Digital Arts and New Media: MFA: Collaboration, Innovation, Social Impact

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Student Works

Smoked Out was an experimental new work about the CZU Lightning Complex fires of 2020 and more importantly, the structural hurdles that those attempting to rebuild afterwards have faced. Out of the 911 homes destroyed during the fires, only 24 have been fully rebuilt over the intervening 32... [more]

Stitching Solidarity creates an enclosed space out of quilts embroidered with images representing the lived experiences of young Muslim people. The cathartic dialogue within their hand-stitched memories reflects conflicting notions of belonging and citizenship that resonate with Muslim... [more]

Digital games typically portray natural environments as static backdrops, limiting their ability to engage with a changing climate. Propagate is a plugin for simulating plant growth and forest dynamics in Unreal Engine, and an ecologically-oriented approach to game design. By building tools in... [more]

blood play is a queer gothic installation that consists of posters with QR codes that link to game fragments and printed zines containing narrative and theory.

Games are unique among media because they allow for—in fact, they almost always depend upon—user interaction. there is... [more]

In the age of machine learning and virtual reality, the human body becomes an image, one both generated and analyzed by these technologies. Classification Cube invites viewers to step into a real-virtual grid and compare the physical body with the virtual one.

From the... [more]

Videogames After Poetry is a collection of videogame poems. Some were created in direct response to written poetry, while others offer meditations inspired by the artist’s daily life. All seek to reimagine videogames as a medium of poetic expression.

From the... [more]

“Troubled Waters: The Ocean as Contested Space in California Surf Culture,” is a site-specific intervention exploring the history of white supremacy, racialized exclusion, and erasure in the formation of the so-called “California Dream” in surf and beach popular culture throughout Pacific Coast... [more]

Wandering is an interactive installation that illuminates physical and emotional entanglement with screen devices and the Internet. It uses motion tracking technology, visual art programming, and display technology to create an immersive experience, highlighting the constant distraction... [more]

Fair Sai Re Pi LLC is a project in reimagining a pyramid scheme company that appropriated Chinese Traditional Medicine to a fictional corporation offering Fire Therapy Treatment, inheriting the wisdom from the ancient Shennong AI. Through bringing audience in a fictional immersive VR... [more]

{ remnants } of a { ritual } is an immersive installation that explores the crossroads of memory, crystallization, love and longing. Seeded with media from the artist’s past, this living archive invites participants to engage with artifacts undergoing cultural and alchemical... [more]

Resonant Waves: Immersed in Geometry reveals hidden and overlooked beauty in the familiar. It visualizes the surprising phenomenon of vibrating water, using sound to generate intricate, dancing, visual, geometric patterns, while also exploring the effect of vibration on our... [more]

Titled, “Untitled” presents a compendium of language games by the artist, created in conversation with various models of language. It compiles games in an online wiki and presents them individually in a reading room installation, referencing and then implementing various theoretical... [more]

Code-Switching is a film and game space that explores the dynamics of how racism communicates in a society that clings to thinly-veiled racist values and policies. Using elements of deeply personal experience and historical symbolism, it works to problematize the concept of whiteness... [more]

Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance! is a series of devised performance experiments exploring how masculinity is navigated, manipulated, and remade in virtual communities. This performance combines the live motion data from three different spheres of pedestrian gesture to create a new choreography–a... [more]

The Last Galician Switchboard is an interactive multi-screen video installation that follows a switchboard operator haunted by family left behind in Eastern Europe. The piece incorporates familial letters and excerpts from Yiddish theatre, literature, and folklore. The work continues the lineage... [more]

Games of the Oppressed creates a scaffolding for playing games critically and thoughtfully, with intention. It implicates players as designers. Following from the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire, it seeks to break down the barrier between players and designers. Players change the rules... [more]

Enviro-Envision is an interactive installation that reflects research about the complex interactions that happen within the Santa Cruz coastal redwood ecosystem. In non- linear narrative form, it reveals the effects and consequences of human-induced climate change on local environments... [more]

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