about
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This is the gateway to what’s going on around Critical Art+Design in the Department of Studio Art at the UC Irvine. This umbrella term covers a wide range of faculty and student practices, but they all share an emphasis on hybrid methods that integrate computation with other media, and that are critically engaged with key cultural issues. We believe that the principles of both design and computation inform much of the most exciting work being done by today’s culture workers, and that an era of wide-ranging collaborations between artists, scientists, technologists, and thinkers in other fields is moving the practice of artists beyond the traditional exhibition venues to sites where they intervene more directly in the shaping of society.
Student and faculty projects; events of interest; online resources; and information about our faculty, facilities, and curriculum can all be found on this site. We also host blogs by members of our community. If you are interested in starting your own blog here, please email alafarge [at] uci [dot] edu.
A little history: Studio Art started building out its new media area in the mid 1990s, and the curriculum has changed and expanded with the arrival of each of the four key faculty members: Robert Nideffer (1998), Antoinette LaFarge (1999), Simon Penny (2002), and Beatriz da Costa (2003). As the new media area has gained focus, the term Critical Art+Design better describes the practices and methodologies embraced by the faculty and embedded in the curriculum. Networked performance, art-science collaborations, computer games, multimedia installation, information design, locative media, and transmedia are all areas in which our faculty and graduate students have done recent work. Check out our faculty members’ websites from their links on the “faculty” page.
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