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.
General Education Code
PR-C
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.
General Education Code
PR-C
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.
General Education Code
PR-C
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.
General Education Code
PE-T
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.
General Education Code
PE-T
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.
General Education Code
PR-C
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.
Cross Listed Courses
ART 105
General Education Code
PR-C
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.
General Education Code
PR-C
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.
General Education Code
PE-H
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.
General Education Code
IM
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.
General Education Code
PR-C
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.
General Education Code
IM
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.
General Education Code
PR-C
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.
General Education Code
PE-H
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.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Cross-listed Courses
Focuses on media, such as computer games, that invite and structure play. Work includes building and critiquing a series of prototypes; studying major examples in the field; and discussing both theoretical and practice-oriented texts. Enrollment by permission of instructor. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 250D
Focuses on discussion of recent advances in visual storytelling in graphical environments. Major topics covered are: intelligent camera control, shot-compositions, lighting design, interactive storytelling, and computational techniques associated with these applications. Class consists of in-class discussions and student presentations of research papers and a final student project.
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 290P
Theory and hands-on practice to understand what makes user interfaces usable and accessible to diverse individuals. Covers human senses and memory and their design implications, requirement solicitation, user-centered design and prototyping techniques, and expert and user evaluations. Individual research project. Interdisciplinary course for art, social science and engineering graduate students. Students cannot receive credit for this course and
CSE 165.
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 231
Explores the history and global spread of hip hop music and culture. In addition to hip hop history and hip hop studies in the U.S., course also examines the ways that hip hop artists outside of the U.S. have employed African American modes of cultural resistance and commercial engagement. Within that process, continuities between the African American experience of “double consciousness” and the global discrepancies and asymmetries in the postcolonial world are unveiled.
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 205H
Instructor
Karlton Hester, Akua Naru
Study of techniques of algorithmic and computer-assisted composition in a variety of contemporary idioms. Topics may include stochastic methods, generative grammars, search strategies, and the construction of abstract compositional designs and spaces. Final project for course involves students formulating and algorithmically implementing their own theoretical assumptions and compositional strategies.
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 217
Instructor
Matthew Schumaker
Hands-on music technology composition seminar combining real-time computer music applications with instrumental writing or installation work. Students work closely with an accomplished instrumentalist, learning to compose for the instrument with live electronics technology and developing computer programs that accompany the live performance with computer-generated sound. Students examine significant works in this evolving canon, studying both the score and attendant computer programs as models for new compositions. Students may also engage in the creation of installation works, with or without user interaction, and involving a significant computer sound component. The course is designed for students with any level of familiarity with programming to succeed.
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 217A
Instructor
Matthew Schumaker
In-depth examination of John Cage's interdisciplinary work, his pioneering activity in live electronic technology, and his influence in current multimedia creativity. Approximately one-half of the seminary is devoted to student research and creative projects and reflect Cage's legacy.
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 254L
Graduate-level techniques and procedures of computer music composition and visualization. Practical experience in the UCSC electronic music studio with computer composition systems and software, including visualization and interactive performance systems. Extensive exploration of music and interactive graphic programs such as Max/MSP/Jitter. Enrollment is by permission of instructor; appropriate graduate experience required. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 267
Participation by a graduate student in a departmental production of a play, dance concert, or other performance event under supervision of the Instructor-of-Record. Rehearsals culminate in public performance. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students and determined by audition with the instructor and in consultation with the director of graduate studies.
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 251
Introduces the emergent professional artist-scholar into the discipline of what is called practice-as/practice-based/practice-led research in performance and new media. Explores the rationales, conceptual frameworks, and perils that underpin research based on the researcher's own creative endeavors, and that enable the researcher to place their own practice within larger artistic and theoretical paradigms in a written document. (Formerly offered as Text Analysis.)
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 290A
Working in an experimental theater with access to new performance technologies, course explores how cross-media practice can expand on basic theatrical relationships in new and culturally relevant ways.
Cross Listed Courses
DANM 250H