UC Santa Cruz, located on the stunningly beautiful Monterey Bay, is immediately south of Silicon Valley, allowing our faculty and students to take advantage of opportunities such as participation in ZER01, a multi-disciplinary, multi-venue biennial festival of visual and performing arts at the intersection of art, technology and digital culture.
The two-year DANM MFA program brings together faculty and students from across the academic spectrum to pursue interdisciplinary artistic and scholarly research. The diverse curriculum includes collaborative research project groups, where small clusters of students work with professors on artistic, technical and theoretical research in one of four focused areas: Mechatronics, Participatory Culture, Performative Technologies, and Playable Media. Current project group leaders include such notable faculty as: Newton and Helen Meyer Harrison, Jennifer Parker and Barney Haynes, Warren Sack, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and David Yager.
Project group collaborations result in publications and exhibitions. In the photo above, Lyés Belhocine, DANM MFA class of 2010, builds his installation “Sounds Interesting…”, representing the Mechatronics collaborative research project group, sonicSENSE, at the recent 01SJ festival in San Jose.
Core and elective courses in the theory and practice of digital media arts support the development of individual thesis papers and projects premiered in the program’s annual MFA Exhibition. The MFA is a terminal degree in the field of Digital Media Arts, qualifying graduates for a variety of career paths including university-level teaching and public- and private-sector research.
Information on the program and application process is available at our website: http://danm.ucsc.edu. Send further inquiries to [email protected]
