DANM - Digital Arts and New Media

Students learn the basics of queer theory and how to apply it to game design and play. They engage with a number of queer games both physical and digital as well as learn how to apply queer theory to their own design and style of play.

Beginning with the Stonewall Riots in 1969, course traces the work of queer and trans artists over the five decades that followed. Students consider representations of queer life amid the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s, underground experimental film and New Queer Cinema, art of the AIDS crisis and the activist art collectives of ACT UP, and millennial artists working today across digital and fine arts. One of the driving questions of our explorations will be, how do these artists undo and rework concepts like identity, medium, and form?

Throughout the 10-week course, students are guided through the principles and elements of digital design and digital filters for editing as a creative approach to image-making, template building, poster design, collage, and color theory methodology. Students are encouraged to develop a portfolio of digital images based on their primary interests. The course is focused on aesthetics, color theory, and design as the central common theme.

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 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.

How can we understand surveillance through a digital arts lens? What are the connections between surveillance and race, gender, sexuality, and class? How can we challenge oppressive surveillance policies in creative ways? In this interdisciplinary course students critically engage with the topic of surveillance by interacting with important scholarship and artworks in digital arts and surveillance studies. Knowledge on the subject deepened through class discussions, submission of written reflections, and group creative responses to the course content.

Students get a grounding in the fundamentals of game design and character driven performance. Meetings focus on a combination of understanding current practice across various styles of interactivity, and practice of participatory performance culminating in a short group performance with participatory elements.

Examines writing about Queer games—both academic and non-academic—as well as contemporary Queer games. Students write an essay that synthesizes Queer theory and game studies and also answer a few short questions about each reading. A midterm draft of the game and a final prototype are required, as well as a post-mortem as a final paper. Throughout the course, students gain experience in looking critically at pieces of digital media art, creating short video games, and reading Queer theory as well as game studies writing.

Introductory course on the process of game prototyping. By playing seminal works made by oppressed creators in the industry, and performing close readings of their mechanics, students build games literacy and learn how to use free and low-cost tools to make personal, fluid work. Engages in the creation of games on a weekly basis, while thinking about the political, artistic, and cultural values the work embodies. Throughout this process, students discuss different models of prototyping, iterate on game design procedure, and reflect deeply on their finished work.

Survey course on game communities. Games are a globally entrenched medium, with communities of players gathering together both online and offline. Students map how different communities navigate status and mastery, study online fan groups, and document their interactions to gain a better understanding of the dynamics at play. Investigates how marginalized communities can be left behind in the search for mastery, and as a class students create tools for intervening in our own communities when exclusionary trends are seen.

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 of $118.

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.

Workshop investigating moving and still images to create visual and sonic languages for production, exhibition and installation. Core faculty Mark Nash and Isaac Julien invite students to participate in ongoing projects as well as present and discuss their own work. Established artists, film makers and curators are also invited to present their work to the group. (Formerly offered as Research Group: Isaac Julien Studio Lab.)

Cross Listed Courses

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Research group course focusing on research and production of Isaac Julien's and Mark Nash's moving image and curatorial projects. Course takes place in the Isaac Julien Studio in London. Students encouraged to develop and prototype their own projects and thesis work. Course includes case studies, workshops, guest speakers, seminar discussions, and site visits. Outside of class students work on independent projects, as well as projects in the Isaac Julien Lab alongside staff. Enrollment is by instructor permission and open to DANM graduate students and graduate and Ph.D. students in other project groups or programs upon application.

The IAPL is open to musicians, visual artists, programmers, designers, writers, dancers, actors, or artists of any discipline. The course/lab addresses various topics regarding interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and multimedia practices, including performance practices, collaborative art-making, improvisation and listening, music and video performance software, networked performance, distribution, and online broadcasting. Each Interdisciplinary Arts Production Lab series involves the creation and development of special project and artworks that are presented either at the end of the term or at the conclusion of the academic year.

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.