Call For Applications :: Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program @ UC Santa Cruz

[text=center] "Squinky" Photo Credit: Sean McGowen
[/text]
[text=center]MFA program application deadline: January 7, 2014[/text]

The Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz is initiating new collaborative research projects in the context of the program's ongoing research. Collaborating with faculty and contributing to digital media arts research is a critical component of each student's experience in the DANM MFA program. MFA students entering in Fall 2014 will have the opportunity to collaborate on the following projects:


Mechatronics :: OpenLab: Art+Science Research
Faculty: Jennifer Parker
Create interactive art and design projects as part of OpenLab(openlabresearch.com), a collaborative Art + Science research initiative. Projects stem from a systems-based approach for fabricating functional experimental art devices that combine principles of sculpture, kinetics, electronics, motion control, sensors, actuators, motors, and other control devices with Arduino Boards using Max/MSP/Jitter and Processing as the primary programming languages. The conceptual framework of the projects created by the Mechatronic’s group will be developed in response to the research topics chosen by the cohort.
[more: danm.ucsc.edu/research/mechatronics/openlab-artscience-research-2015]
 
Participatory Culture :: The Force Majeure
Faculty: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison
Join the the Force Majeure a 50-year collaboration between the Harrison Studio and the Center for Art + Environment at Nevada Museum of Art. The term 'The Force Majeure' refers to the inexorable force of human-based global warming acting in transaction with our vast processes of resource extraction and CO2 production. The Harrisons review a 40 year career referring to their own work and the work of others that led to the Force Majeure concepts. Explore and create the projects and game structures demonstrating how to buffer drought and erratic weather, which will inevitably impact the San Francisco Bay as well as the high grounds of the Sierra Nevada. [more: danm.ucsc.edu/research/participatory-culture/force-majeure-2015]

Participatory Culture :: Public Records: New Media Documentary
Faculty: Sharon Daniel
The interactive, web-based, database-driven, new media documentary is now perhaps, one of the most rapidly emerging new media forms. Explore the aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of such new and expanded forms of documentary practice – experimenting with new methodologies and technologies to generate new kinds of politically and socially productive documents of our situated realities. Research group members will pursue their own documentary-based creative practice and research, with feedback from faculty and other group members while participating in one or more group projects. [more: danm.ucsc.edu/research/participatory-culture/public-records-new-media-documentary-2015]
 
Performative Technologies :: There will not be a Performative Technologies project group in 2014-15 but there continue to be faculty members and campus resources for students whose research interests lie in this area.
 
Playable Media :: Experimental Play
Faculty: Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas
From the rise of the New Games movement and the emergence of the role-playing game (in the 1970s) to the current moment’s opportunities for pervasive, gestural, networked, and potentially deeply responsive computer games, we are changing who plays, how we play, and what play can mean. Experimental Play invites those who want to invent and explore new play spaces. It seeks participants who will take play-oriented approaches to storytelling, ideology, sociality, performance, and other rich areas of human life. [more: danm.ucsc.edu/research/playable-media/experimental-play-2015]

The application for admission deadline is January 7.
 


ABOUT DANM
The Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz is an interdisciplinary center for the development and study of digital media arts and their social impact. From its base in the state-of-the-art Digital Arts Research Center, this intensive two-year MFA program brings together faculty and students from across the academic spectrum to pursue artistic and scholarly research.
 
In addition to conducting collaborative research that results in publications and exhibitions, DANM students take core and elective courses in the theory and practice of digital media arts. Their journey culminates in the development of individual thesis projects, which premier in our annual MFA exhibition. The MFA is the terminal degree in the field of digital media arts, qualifying graduates for a variety of career paths including university-level teaching and research.
 
FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE
DANM makes a strong effort to help its students put together the support they need, including teaching assistantships for the first year. Additional support may be available in the form of grants and fellowships, graduate student researchships or additional teaching assistantships; some are awarded based on need, others on academic merit. Graduate students are encouraged to apply for both.
 
[text=right]MORE INFORMATION
http://danm.ucsc.edu/admissions

Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program
University of California, Santa Cruz
[email protected]
+1-831-459-1554
http://danm.ucsc.edu[/text]