Announcements

The excitement is building about DANM's new home, the Digital Arts Research Center. We'll be moving in Fall 2009! Check out the DARC.

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06.11.2009 :: Leonardo to publish article by DANM's Bob Giges and Ted Warburton

DANM alumnus Bob Giges and DANM faculty and professor of theater arts Edward C. "Ted" Warburton have collaborated on an artist’s article on Lubricious Transfer -- the telematic dance piece between UCSC and NYU dancers in 2005. Says Giges, "The article is a bit experimental in form in that it’s multi-vocal: our individual narration of the performance in present tense alternates with discussion of the theoretical implications of the work (research I began as a DANM grad student)." The 5,000 word article will appear in the February 2010 issue, and will include photos by Jim MacKenzie.

The article is entitled "From Router to Front Row: Lubricious Transfer and the Aesthetics of Telematic Performance" Authors: Bob Giges and Edward C. Warburton

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05.29.2009 :: OPEN CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS FOR ASEUM 2009

ASEUM Symposium

• July 21-25, 2009
• Manila, Philippines
• Submission Deadline: June 30, 2009

ASEUM is an international network of new media art practitioners pushing for cultural, educational, and technological exchange on emerging new media art practices in South East Asia and Europe. Initiated bySABAW Media Art Kitchen (Philippines) and Multimedia Center KIBLA (Slovenia), ASEUM hopes to draw attention to artists, their work, their perspectives and the complex interrelationships between technology, art and culture through various symposia, workshops, and collaborative endeavors.

Discussions on interactive design, networked cultures, the burgeoning open source software movements, interactivity, data visualization, bio-technology, DIY electronics, open-source hardware, computer/electronic music, and sound and video art are among the few topics that will be tackled by some of the most recognized artists working on new media art and technology in Europe and Asia.

This year’s symposium is slated to run from July 21-25, 2009 in Manila, Philippines and is open to all artists,software programmers, engineers, scientists, students, DIY hobbyists, and art enthusiasts. The symposium will feature new media artists from Europe and Asia through a series of interactive sessions, open fora, live audio-video performances and presentations in top universities and renowned artist-run spaces in Metro Manila.

Please note that the hands-on workshop labs on graphical programming languages Pure Data and DIY sound devices using Arduino can only accommodate a limited number of participants.

To be considered for participation, please submit a 1-2 paragraph essay (not more than 300 words) stating your purposes in joining, including how you can contribute to the symposium given your specialization or field of work. Please also submit your full contact details along with the essay on or before June 30, 2009 to sabawmediahub@gmail.com or contact 09175191511.

Complete details regarding symposium venues, speakers, performers, presentation topics, and program flow available upon request; email chesquita@gmail.com.

ASEUM is sponsored by ASIA-EUROPE FOUNDATION as part of the Follow Up Project (FUP) of the 5th-6thArt Camp New Media and the Mini Summit on New Media Art policy & practice.

Feel free to disseminate this email to interested parties, to blogs, websites, the like.

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05.15.2009 :: DANM students participate in 5th annual Graduate Symposium

Ten of DANM's first- and second-year students showed their work as part of the campus-wide graduate symposium. DANM chair Sharon Daniel extended "...congratulations to all of you who participated in yesterday's Graduate Research Symposium. You all did a great job. I felt proud of the work you presented and very pleased to have you represent DANM. Special congrats also to Josh and Nada who won the division awards! And thanks to faculty and staff who showed up to support."

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04.03.2009 :: Work by DANM Faculty Chip Lord part of "Broadcast" traveling exhibition at Pratt Manhattan Gallery through May 2

"Broadcast" is a traveling exhibition co-organized by the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, and iCI (Independent Curators International), New York; circulated by iCI; and guest-curated by Irene Hofmann. The exhibition comes to Pratt Manhattan Gallery from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. The exhibition and tour are made possible, in part, with support from the iCI Exhibition Partners.

The exhibition is on view now through May 2, 2009 and features work by Dara Birnbaum; Chris Burden; Gregory Green; Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Jody Procter; Christian Jankowski; Inigo Manglano-Ovalle; Antoni Muntadas; neuroTransmitter; Nam June Paik; TVTV (Top Value Television); and Siebren Versteeg.

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03.25.2009 :: Film by DANM 2nd-year student Nada Miljković to be part of the Santa Cruz Film Festival

View the film at the festival or here.

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for Gaza by DANM student Laila Shereen, 2009.

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01.13.2009 :: Chip Lord to create video artwork for LAX

DANM faculty and Professor of film and digital media Chip Lord is one of 20 artists who have been commissioned to create video artworks for an innovative installation at Los Angeles International Airport. full story

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01.07.2009 :: DANM Announces New Collaborative Research Projects in Digital Media Arts

The Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz is pleased to announce the initiation of new collaborative research projects in the context of the program’s ongoing research. Collaborating with faculty and contributing to digital media arts research that results in publications and exhibitions is a critical component of each student’s experience in the DANM program. Students entering in Fall 2009 will have the opportunity to collaborate on the following projects:

• Participatory Culture :: Software as Culture Faculty: Warren Sack Despite its ubiquity, most of the software of our software culture has been designed and implemented by engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who have deployed little or no knowledge of the history of art, media, and culture in their creations. Employ the medium of software as artists, designers and humanists to articulate a set of alternatives to the conditions of contemporary technology.

• Performative Technologies :: Digital Media in Live Performance Faculty: James Bierman, Elliot Anderson, Danny Scheie Digital media technologies can play a role in every aspect of theatrical performance from the very conception of the performance to the actual production. Create a theatrical performance incorporating digital production elements capable of stepping from the background into the foreground, and of moving the performance through transitional moments in a manner previously reserved for live performers.

• Playable Media :: Playable Fictions Faculty: Noah Wardrip-Fruin Play can change the audience’s relationship to a fiction. It is also a powerful method of developing audience understanding of a computational system, which is perhaps the most promising future territory for the development of digital fictions. Explore the potential of playable experiences that combine the concerns of fiction (language, character, story), the techniques and research methods of media making and computer science, and the insights of game design.

• Mechatronics :: TBA UCSC is actively recruiting faculty in Electronic Arts, who will lead this project group.

The application deadline for Fall 2009 admission is February 15.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM The Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz serves as a center for the development and study of digital media arts and their social impact. This intensive two-year MFA program brings together faculty and students from across the academic spectrum to pursue interdisciplinary artistic and scholarly research. In addition to conducting collaborative research in one of four areas – Mechatronics, Participatory Culture, Performative Technologies, or Playable Media – DANM students take core and elective courses in the theory and practice of digital media arts. The MFA journey culminates in the development of individual thesis projects, which are premiered in our annual MFA exhibition. The MFA is the terminal degree in the field of digital media arts, qualifying graduates for a variety of career paths including university-level teaching and research.

RESOURCES Beginning in Fall 2009, DANM will occupy the new, state-of-the-art Digital Arts Facility at UC Santa Cruz. http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/daf

VISITING ARTISTS An ongoing speaker series takes place on campus throughout the year and includes noted regional and international visiting artists.

FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE DANM makes a strong effort to help graduate students put together the support they need while attending the program, including teaching assistantships for the first year. Additional support may be in the form of grants and fellowships, graduate student researchships or additional teaching assistantships, depending on the availability of funds. Certain kinds of support are awarded on the basis of academic merit, and others are granted on the basis of need. Graduate students are encouraged to apply for both kinds.

ADMISSIONS INFORMATION For information on the program and application process, visit: http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/ApplicationInfo.

MORE INFORMATION http://danm.ucsc.edu/

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12.17.2008 :: PLAYABLE MEDIA -- A NEW RESEARCH FOCUS AT UC SANTA CRUZ DIGITAL ARTS AND NEW MEDIA MFA PROGRAM

UC Santa Cruz is pleased to announce an MFA for artists working with computer games, software toys, interactive fictions, rhetorical simulations, and related playable forms. The university's Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program has added "Playable Media" as a research focus for its collaborative faculty-student projects. Applications to the DANM MFA program for Fall 2009 are being accepted through February 15, and are encouraged from the broad diversity of artists who create work that invites and structures play.

The Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz brings together faculty and students from across the academic spectrum to pursue interdisciplinary artistic and scholarly research. At the core of the diverse DANM curriculum are collaborative research projects, in which small clusters of students work with professors on artistic, technical and theoretical research. Over the course of three quarters, these groups engage in the development of faculty-initiated research in one of four focused areas: Mechatronics, Participatory Culture, Performative Technologies, and Playable Media. These collaborations result in publications and exhibitions. In this intensive two-year program, students also take core and elective courses in the theory and practice of digital media arts, culminating in the development of individual thesis projects. These works are premiered in the program's annual MFA exhibition. The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) is the terminal degree in the field of digital media arts, qualifying graduates for a variety of career paths including university-level teaching and research.

In the Playable Media collaborative research group, MFA students will work with UCSC's strong faculty in this area to understand and create new ways for computer games and related forms to engage audiences, make arguments, tell stories, and shape social space. Ongoing Playable Media work combines game design and artificial intelligence research with writing, art, and media authoring.

The Playable Media-focused Digital Arts and New Media MFA joins UCSC's two previous degree options in this area. UCSC currently hosts the first computer game undergraduate major in the University of California system: a B.S. in computer game design through the Computer Science department. Active PhD research is also taking place in Computer Science, where students are developing underlying technologies for new genres of computer game play. It is expected that some DANM Playable Media students will collaborate with students in the existing programs in order to create projects more ambitious than would otherwise be possible.

The first Playable Media collaborative research group will be launched in 2009 under the direction of Noah Wardrip-Fruin (co-creator of the virtual reality literary game Screen, co-editor of MIT Press books such as Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media). Other UCSC faculty in this area include Michael Mateas (co-creator of Independent Games Festival finalist Facade and the interactive film generator Terminal Time), Warren Sack (creator of the argumentation game Agonistics and the social technology Conversation Map), and Jim Whitehead (founder of the UC system's first game degree, developer of novel techniques for game level generation).

More about DANM: http://danm.ucsc.edu/

More about Playable Media: http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/PlayableMedia

Application information: http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/ApplicationInfo

Contact: Felicia Rice, Program Manager, 831.459.1554, danm(at)ucsc.edu

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11.12.2008 :: Installations at MESA/ & SF MoMA Show

(from Laila Shereen Sakr)

Hello Everyone,

Hope this finds you well. I have a couple pieces of news to share about current projects...an interactive installation that I helped design, and a new publication that I will be launching! If you are in SF or DC, you can come and check them out--and, there's always an online platform.

1- At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, opening to the public on November 8, 2008, is "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now" curated by Rudolf Frieling. My role was to design the graphical user interface and make a video for Warren Sack's Conversation Map, an online exhibit in the show. If you are in San Francisco now till February, 2009, you can drop in and see the interactive installation or you can participate online.

2- The second announcement is about R-Shief. I will be at the MESA conference in DC this year exhibiting an installation of a prototype and would love to see you there! The exhibit will be at the Marriott Hotel in Woodley Park on Sun 11/23 (9-6pm), Mon 11/24 (9-6pm), and Tues 11/25 (9-12pm). Here's a little blurb about the work:

R-Shief <an online journal> showcases and archives digital video of documentary film, radio, and live cultural programming. Real-time, automated transcriptions alongside editorially selected hypertexts in Arabic and English will feature current developments in the fields of web culture, media and the arts, civil society building and participation among people in contemporary Arab Diaspora.

The publication's Arabic /English content will be organized with added semantic annotations. The platform implements free extensions of the wiki-system powering Wikipedia, and extends them by incorporating a semantic media wiki in Arabic (released April 2008). Using the wiki publishing model, a form of processual publishing, the journal allows users to publish updates and corrections to the automated transcriptions and indexing.

R-Shief is designed for a public moving between the Arab world and the West, a transnational Arab public. R-Shief will provide its community with a hybrid platform to publish, visualize, and semantically organize both digitally sophisticated work and written articles. It offers its users a fresh perspective on the scene of contemporary Arab Diaspora, recognizing web culture as significant in the life of twenty-first century migrants.

If you have recommendations for publication in R-Shief, please let me know. The project is still in its initial stages, and I would be grateful to listen to any suggestions you may have. An official call for submission will follow in a few months.

And finally, I recently uploaded a portfolio of work on my new website at lailashereen.com...a fun design project! You can find out what I'm up to there. If you get a chance to check any of this out, I would love to hear from you. Or just hear from you, in general. Please do keep in touch!

All the best,

Laila

-- laila shereen sakr | 1 202 462 6242 digital arts/new media mfa | university of california, santa cruz
portfolio | http://lailashereen.com r-shief | http://r-shief.org conversation map | http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/ConversationMap

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Application Period Open October 1, 2008 - February 15, 2009

Applications for Fall 2009 are accepted from October 1, 2008–February 15, 2009. For information regarding applying to DANM, please visit http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/ApplicationInfo. For more information contact Felicia Rice, Program Manager at 832 459-1554 or fsrice@ucsc.edu.

DANM Open House scheduled for Thursday, November 6 (2:00-5:30). To RSVP and for more information contact Felica Rice, Program Manager at 831-459-1554 or fsrice@ucsc.edu.

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Welcome to Fall 08 at DANM, UCSC

• Tech orientation for first-year students: September 8-19
• Quarter begins September 20
• Fall mixer for students & faculty September 23 4-6pm
• Instruction begins Thursday, September 25

The DANM Schedule? has been added to the wiki. Look for an improved calendar to be implemented later this quarter.

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2007-08

04.29.2008 :: Sharon Daniel awarded Media Arts Fellowship

UCSC DANM Chair and Film & Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel has received a 2008 Media Arts Fellowship (formerly the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship) from the Tribeca Film Institute. Awarded to filmmakers and media artists whose work is innovative, creative and pushes boundaries, the Fellowships provide support to 22 filmmakers and media artists each year. The Fellowships offer financial support for artists working in the narrative, documentary, experimental, installation and computer-generated media genres. Daniel was one of six artists to be named as a New Media Fellow.

The Fellowship was awarded in support of her new media documentary Capitalist Punishment, a multi-media work which examines the politics of privatization and labor exploitation within the United States prison system. The work will include a museum installation and related electronic tour of prison industry products inscribed with statements by prison laborers, as well as an interactive website that maps the social geography of the prison industrial complex.

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03.10.2008 :: Felicia Rice honored with Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship

(from Currents article by Scott Rappaport)

UCSC alumna Felicia Rice (Cowell '78)--manager for the Digital Arts and New Media M.F.A. program—has been awarded a $20,000 Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship. Rice is one of four Santa Cruz County artists selected from a pool of 46 visual artists that will receive the grants to pursue their work.

The Rydell fellowships were established by long-time Santa Cruz cultural icons Roy and Frances Rydell and are administered by the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County. They are awarded solely on artistic merit by a panel of arts professionals from outside the Santa Cruz area.

A lifelong resident of the California coast, Rice came to Santa Cruz as a student at UCSC in 1974. Three years later, she established Moving Parts Press web site and began her career as a printer, teacher, literary/fine arts publisher, and book artist.

Work from Moving Parts Press has been included in exhibitions and collections both nationally and internationally--from book shows in New York and Frankfurt to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Moving Parts Press has also received numerous awards and grants from organizations that include the National Endowment for the Arts and the French Ministry of Culture.

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Welcome to the world!

Congratulations to two of our DANM families on the birth of their beautiful, healthy babies!

Amel Helen Sakr, born November 5, 2007 to DANM student Laila Shereen Sakr and Fadi Sakr.

Edward Haydn Zenack Warburton, born January 9, 2008 to Samantha R. Zenack and DANM faculty Edward C. (Ted) Warburton