On February 10, 2017, Wireframe Studio hosted its first public event in a beta launch as co-founding directors continue to prototype the studio virtually and in materiality. Leading an innovative form of humanities-based inquiry that explores digital media through critically informed collaborative design practices, UC Santa Barbara Film and Media Studies Professors Laila Shereen Sakr and Alenda Chang established Wireframe Studio in 2017. The official launch will be in October 2017.
Wireframe provides a space for media production and critical engagement across the genres of digital media and conceptual art, live cinema, livestreaming, virtual reality, projection mapping/VJ’ing, public art and performance, web-based interventions, gaming, and hacking. With this open studio, Wireframe seeks to devise aesthetic strategies for making visible persistent forms of oppression and exploitation and exploring personal and collective subjectivities, while attentive to the challenges of working across racial, gendered, class-based, historical, and geographical divisions. Wireframe offers a) production and post-production equipment with which to experiment across activist media, creative data visualization, installation art and public interactives, software apps, live cinema/projection mapping, gaming, livestreaming, social media, and cultural analytics; b) multiple screening sites for staging and sharing complex work in environmental and feminist media, and sparking dialogue among cultural producers, scholars, and activists around the legacies and continued importance of emerging digital media practices.