Explore media technologies by directly engaging digital platforms, transmission, and storage, as direct rather than indirect practices. Topics covered, through lenses of both theory and practice, include global circulation of media—emphasizing the contemporary digital image, relations between sound and mobile-technology media and the environment, and the technical infrastructure of digital interfaces and data visualization. Critiquing data collection, representation, and curation, student projects build a vocabulary for critical engagement with cultural production and conditions.
Enrollment is restricted to proposed and declared art majors.
Cross Listed Courses
ART 102
The study of power in contemporary media environments. How do audience, genre, medium, and other contexts impact our reception of a message? Explores contemporary theory and practice of media, applied to commercial and institutional promotion, advertising, and activism. Enables critical views of media in social, cultural, and political contexts. Projects combine scholarship and creative work to invite students' imagination of a media world in which learning, dialogue, contemplation, fun, and play can help enable flourishing and just communities.
Instructor
Ben Carson, Dorothy Santos
General Education Code
PE-H
Introduction to computing for physical and sensory interaction, including machine-based sensors for audio, vision, and motion, and their uses in designed participatory experiences. How do sense-like functions in hardware and software compare and relate to the physiology of sensation and perception on which they are modeled? What are the implications of sensory interaction, ableism, disability, and accessibility? Student projects explore collaborative approaches to the production of interactive digital art and design.
Instructor
Ben Carson, Dorothy Santos
Project-driven practicum in arts and design applications of computer languages. Students apply new approaches to ongoing individual and collaborative projects. Students learn to code "from scratch," rather than through the modification of prototype examples. Explore how programming languages function not only as tools but as institutional frameworks, sometimes invisibly shaping social norms and contemporary art and design practices; learn conscientious uses of code that can contribute to accessible technology and the empowerment of audiences, users, and media consumers.
Instructor
Sal Moreno, Abram Stern
Project-driven practicum in technology-engaged creative collaboration in a range of hardware, software, and media contexts. Students develop a project while reimagining and questioning assumed relationships between technology and application. Course materials traverse creative collaboration comprehensively: from envisioning a project scope, to grant-writing and other fundraising. Students may use their final project in this course as a basis for their “capstone” project in the Senior Studio Production course.
Instructor
Ben Carson, Joseph Erb
General Education Code
PR-E
Story-building, participatory creativity, and performance in a wide range of time-based arts and design. Models for storytelling are drawn from film, television, music, theater, gaming, and other media, including collective improvisatory practices, mixed transmission environments from game-based narration to hip-hop. Special emphasis is placed on activist, experimental, and counter-hegemonic narration, Black, Indigenous, feminist, and queer contributions to contemporary arts, design, and performance practices.
Instructor
Ben Carson, Dorothy Santos
Explores the state’s vital queer art communities as a cultural phenomena, primarily through one-on-one interviews with contemporary queer artists in California. In the face of rising homophobia and transphobia in many parts of the country, this course centers and makes visible the work of BIPOC LGBTQIE+ artists, including those with disabilities, and many others. Course develops literacy and comprehension of queer artists and their artworks. Through a combination of lectures, visual presentations, films, readings, short quizzes and discussion boards, students gain the skills and knowledge to become conversant in queer art. For their final project, students conduct their own interview with a queer artist of their choosing, collectively developing their own queer art archive.
Instructor
Dorothy Santos, Elizabeth Stephens
Students culminate the creative technologies degree by assembling artist/designer statements, curating their portfolio, learning a range of professional practices in the presentation of a body of work. Prepares graduating seniors to share creative findings, voice, and vision, commencing public life as artists, designers, and curators who take leadership in the complex communities and information landscapes of the 21st-century.
Instructor
A.M. Darke, Kristen Gillette, Yolande Harris, Dorothy Santos