DANM - Digital Arts and New Media

Engages the topic of embodiment within new media art theory and practice. Focus is on embodiment within performance, time-based, electronic, and new media arts practice. Students produce a final paper and artistic project on the topic. Lower-division undergraduates may enroll with permission of instructor.

Hands-on course surveying the thriving micro-genres in the neutral zone between games and literature. Students read, play, and author stories that couldn't exist on a printed page. Interactive fiction, algorithmic poetry, and brand-new experiments.

Introduces electronics using the open-source Arduino platform. Learn how to build interactive circuits through hands-on tutorials. In a workshop environment, students acquire the technical skills required to create electronic artwork. No previous experience required.

Hacking is the modification, reconfiguration, and reuse of computer code or hardware to create new functionality. Course encourages a hands-on approach to digital-media creation including the basics of computer programming and hacking techniques. No programming experience required.

Explores the history of machines. Kinetic art is presented including: animatronic puppetry, balance mobiles, light compositions, logic and mechanical art, interactive sculpture, and resonance cymatics. Students utilize automation techniques to create art projects using a modular set of gears, linkages, cams, belts, and springs. Discussion of technological advances in the field of kinetic art and its impact on society.

Introduces the basic principles of geographic analysis and visual communication through mapmaking. Projects focus on environmental issues, and class discusses best practices for distributing information and communicating ideas.

Teaches techniques to animate sculptures, such as wearables/body art, mobility, puppetry, sound, light, or projection. Covers building techniques and how to incorporate individual creativity in a collaborative setting to create a common theme for the procession.

Learn to design functional objects, sculpture, and other digitally inspired forms in a variety of 3-D applications (Cinema 4-D, Maya, AutoCad, Rhino, SketchUp), then produce those models as physical objects with a variety of rapid prototyping methods including additive 3-D printing, CNC milling, vacuum forming, and laser cutting. Students are billed a course materials fee.

Students learn to create interactive artwork through the combination of fiber arts and reactive technology. Course explores electronic art that is worn or touched, and discovers new developments in eTextiles that allow for this interaction.

By investigating topics related to water in California, students produce works of digital and new media art that engage with environmental issues and the local community.

Independent digital arts and new media research project under the guidance of a digital arts and new media faculty member or other faculty. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to juniors and seniors.

Independent digital arts and new media research project under the guidance of a digital arts and new media faculty member or other faculty. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Students examine methods and approaches to research and writing in digital art and new media, while exploring key theories concerning technology, art, and culture. Focus is on the interaction between digital technologies and socio/cultural formations.

Students engage in dialogues at the intersection of theory and practice with the goal of producing a pre-thesis proposal and essay. Readings and seminar discussions inform the development of project proposals and essays, which theoretically contextualize students' work.

A professional art practices practicum that focuses on researching opportunities and developing practical strategies and skills to ensure success outside an academic environment.

Students work on the design of individual projects by developing project proposals, budgets, proof of concept design documents and/or prototypes and exploring tools, technologies, programming languages, hardware, software, and electronics techniques relevant to their projects.

First-year digital arts and new media graduate students are required to present work-in-progress based on the projects developed in earlier courses and during the current quarter in individual studio critiques with the instructor as well as in group critiques.

First-year digital art and new media graduate students work on the development and completion of their thesis-project proposal and abstract under the supervision of the program chair and their thesis committees.

Second-year digital arts and new media graduate students work with faculty curator/coordinator to develop thesis projects specifically for the group exhibition context. Students contribute to exhibition design and collateral materials while studying the unique presentation and curatorial challenges of new media.

Explores the appearance, form, and theoretical status of the human body/political subject in online art. Focuses on representations of race and gender, family resemblances, and local communities, as well as the political and colonial metaphors of spatial interaction operating on the World Wide Web. Visual representations of bodies that take the form of avatars, advertising, robots, and anime studied in their contextual usage.

Intensive introduction to electronic devices used in artmaking, providing hands-on experience with sensors, motors, switches, gears, lights, simple circuits, microprocessors, and hardware storage devices to create kinetic and interactive works of art. Students are billed a materials fee.

Covers aspects of computer programming necessary for digital art projects. Students learn to manipulate digital media using program control for installations, presentations, and the Internet. No prior programming experience required.

Examines the role of mathematics in the arts since the computer revolution with an emphasis on chaos, fractals, and symmetry. Covers abstract animation and algorithmic music, including the history of leading innovators and techniques from 1950 to the present. Student projects explore the creative process today using cutting-edge technologies.

Exploration of projected light in performance and art. The history of lighting as art is covered in a hands-on demystifying format from the shadow of a bare light bulb to the latest in automated and projection equipment and techniques.

Combination theory and studio-based exploration into the role of the object in real and virtual space. Provides a broad conceptual and theoretical examination of issues relating to object-making on a physical and dematerialized plane.

A history of the visual arts from the 1910s to the 1960s beginning in Europe and moving to the United States. Follows key movements of modern art while emphasizing the social, political, and philosophical events that inform it. Students cannot receive credit for this course and HAVC 141B.

Three-quarter, collaborative-research, project group encompasses a range of faculty-initiated projects that investigate new methods in art and science collaboration to solve real-world problems and produce outcomes of substantial artistic and scientific value.

Three-quarter, collaborative-research, project group encompasses a range of faculty-initiated projects that join digital methods with community-media activism to facilitate a culture of participation and social engagement.

Three-quarter, collaborative-research, project group encompasses a range of faculty-initiated projects that investigate performance and embodied experience as profound sources of understanding and communication, pushing the limits of human identity, affect, empathy, and expression.

Three-quarter, collaborative-research, project group encompasses a range of faculty-initiated projects that investigate computer games and related forms to engage audiences, make arguments, tell stories, and shape social space through creation of new games and through reading and playing related works.

Research  group encompasses a range of faculty-initiated projects that investigate moving and still images to create visual and sonic languages for production, exhibition and installation.

Research group course taken by DANM students recruited to the Isaac Julien Lab, and focuses on production of Isaac Julien's and Mark Nash’s research, in parallel with students working on their own projects to develop and prototype their thesis work. Course includes case studies, workshops, guest speakers, seminar discussions, and site visits in London. Outside of class students will work on their independent projects, as well as projects in the Isaac Julien Lab alongside lab staff. Enrollment is by permission and is restricted to digital arts and new media graduate students in the Isaac Julien lab; and other DANM graduate students in other project groups or programs upon application to the instructors.

Reading and practice in empirical methods, as applied to the study of music, visual art, multimedia production, and performance arts. Topics include semiotics, critiques of empiricism, cultural determinants and contingents of perception, the psychophysics of information, sensory perception (visual and auditory), memory, pattern recognition, and awareness. Students apply existing knowledge in the cognitive sciences to a developing creative project, or develop and conduct new experiments.

Weekly seminar covering topics of current research in digital arts and new media. Focuses on student presentations and seminar participation.

This hybrid theory/practice course examines the social implications of emerging technologies and cultural practices, with a focus on how artists and other producers engage with them in a critical manner that reveals their inner logics and/or deploys them for alternative purposes.

Independent digital arts and new media research project under the guidance of a digital arts and new media faculty member or other faculty with approval of adviser. Project includes readings, research, and a written report. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students. Maximum 10 credits.

Independent digital arts and new media research project under the guidance of a digital arts and new media faculty member or other faculty with approval of adviser. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students. May be repeated for a maximum 6 credits.

Students carry out a master's of fine arts thesis in digital arts and new media research, under the guidance of a thesis committee. The thesis will be an arts project with digital documentation accompanied by a written paper discussing the student's preparatory research as well as the theoretical significance of the project. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students. Maximum 10 credits.