By Saeri Plagmann
After a trial run back in 2017, the Media Arts and Technology (MAT) graduate program at UC Santa Barbara officially established undergraduate courses for the first time this academic year.
The series of courses, titled Mediated Worlds, are led by MAT graduate program professor Marcos Novak, a virtual architect and the founder and director of the department’s transLAB research facility, which investigates how technology affects virtual space in art and science.
UC Santa Barbara professor Marcos Novak has brought undergraduate courses to the Media Arts and Technology graduate program for the first time this academic year.
Novak and his colleagues designed Mediated Worlds to provide a transdisciplinary approach to the way we treat and comprehend knowledge. Mediated Worlds is a sequence of seven courses, each providing a different emphasis. This spring, the series offered a course with an Arts and Sciences emphasis.
The curriculum uses the THEMAS model, which proposes that the interconnection of technologies and humanities, engineering and mathematics, and arts and sciences shape our understanding and creation of the world around us.
“One of our big mottos is that we try to teach all these many dimensions through a central notion of world-making,” Novak said. “How do you make a fictional world? How do you make an actual world? How do we make the world through our own citizenship or own personhood or own relationship to one another?”
In a recent virtual interview, Novak discussed the new undergraduate courses and the importance of cross-disciplinary connections to frame knowledge.
Q: Why did you want to open MAT courses to undergraduate students?
A: We offered it as an undergraduate program through Interdisciplinary Studies and proved that there was interest in this kind of subject matter, that there would be students who would enjoy it and thrive in it. We are a graduate program, and mistakenly we had thought, because of the way it’s organized, we wouldn’t be able to do that. And we discovered that we could.
Q: What does Mediated Worlds offer to undergrads?
A: There are many kinds of mottos and flags and phrases that we use to try to encapsulate [it]. The original impulse of the course is to observe that science, technology, engineering, art, and math are a good thing. But what about the creative humanities? So, with that in mind, one of these phrases is that the course is ‘from its conception, holistic.’ It's integrative, and it’s creative. There are few places where students can go where they can study media, math, and physics, but also art and design and literature and philosophy and actually be able to converse with one another and with all their interests in one place.
Q: The graduate courses in person are very hands-on and interactive. How have you navigated instructing this course virtually?
A: We couldn’t have anticipated the actual pandemic. But we could and did anticipate that education itself was moving into virtual space. THEMAS itself is a conception about how we gain knowledge in our time with everything online and everything accessible. It’s a model for how education can happen. But the particular instantiation of that model is a series of courses called Mediated Worlds. We were looking at mediation before the pandemic and we were trying to teach as much as possible with materials that could be found online. And so, when the pandemic happened, we were just ready because we were already operating that way.
The THEMAS model proposes how the interconnection of technologies and humanities, engineering and mathematics, and arts and sciences establish our understanding and creation of the world around us.
Q: Do you plan on keeping Mediated Worlds available to undergrads?
A: This is supposed to be a sequence of courses. Seven, perhaps eight, by the time it's all done. When we first proposed this, we collapsed everything into the course pilot and we did everything in 10 weeks, which was a super intense sequence. It was successful. We got to go ahead. Then we expanded it to three courses, which are the courses that are on the books now. But those three courses are supposed to become another three. We're evolving them to make a second three-course sequence. That would be the advanced version, each of them with more hands-on, studio-oriented work. Plus, this summer we created another course [called THEMAS Special Topics: (E)Utopian Design Tools].
When it's fully implemented it's almost like an education within an education. Someone could take the pilot, take the three-course sequence, take the second three-course sequence, take some additional MAT courses, finish their undergraduate maybe with a minor in something like this, get into a program like MAT and finish in a year. So, it's a nicely-thought-out system.
Saeri Plagmann is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Asian American Studies and Japanese. She wrote this piece for her Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.