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Media Arts and Technology Program
George Legrady is director of UC Santa Barbara’sn Experimental Visualization Lab in the Media Arts Technology (MAT) graduate program. He discusses artificial intelligence's positive and negative impacts on art and art engineering in an interview with Humanities and Fine Arts.
Diarmid Flatley, a Ph.D. candidate enrolled in UCSB’s Media Arts and Technology Program, discussed artificial intelligence and his work with “transmodal” arts in an interview with Environmental Studies major Lucian Scher.
Jeremy Kamal, Black culture scholar and professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, showed three futuristic, digitally-realized landscapes for a UC Santa Barbara audience. These landscapes, which are part of a fictional world called “Mojo,” each represent parts of Black identity.
Curtis Roads, professor and chair of Media Arts and Technology at UCSB, spoke to a Santa Barbara audience last week about his career in electronic music composition and music software development. During the lecture, he played some of his more recent pieces and updated his audience on future projects.
UC Santa Barbara’s AlloSphere hosted the premiere of “Musics Of The Spheres,” an experimental work by eclectic composer Robert Morris. His piece uses the full surround-sound capabilities of the AlloSphere to feature music from all across the globe.
Professor, artist, and PhD Student Masood Kamandy says his LGBTQIA+ identity inspires his artistry and drive to educate those locally and abroad in communities of Afghan heritage. He combines his passions for teaching, fine arts, and photography in his research on how to make the field of technology and computing more equitable. He creates programs and coding certificates refined for disadvantaged or minority students that otherwise would have limited access to these resources. He now teaches Javascript and Processing in the Art Department at UC Santa Barbara and Pasadena City College.
Determined to include the arts in the future of STEM, third year UC Santa Barbara biology student Emily Nguyen incorporated technology and science with artistic expression in UCSB’s Art , Science and Technology course. She used her creativity in a project ,The Dexcavator, and in another which has taught her how to collect data from local beaches and apply it to the science behind ocean acidification.
Touch is the largest organ of our body, says Felicia Davis, professor of Architectural Design at Pennsylvania State University. Davis uses computer-manipulated textiles that change in response to their environment. The textiles could provide relief for people who have a hard time expressing or understanding their own emotions. Presented by the graduate program in Media, Arts and Technology, she discussed her project in a recent seminar.
Americans created a criminal punishment system based on the model of quarantine in which the poor and people of color are disproportionately isolated and contained, “treated as a pathogen,” Sharon Daniel, a professor at UC Santa Cruz and media artist, told the UCSB Media Arts and Technology (MAT) graduate program. Now, in the 21st century, the COVID-19, has both exposed and intensified the injustices of the criminal system, Daniel said as she walked through her interactive art documentary “EXPOSED: Documenting COVID-19 in the Criminal Punishment System.”
Yin Yu, a graduate student in UCSB’s Media Arts and Technology (MAT) program, debuted her 3D fusion of biology and technology recently at the Art Department’s Glassbox Gallery. Yu’s pieces “OctoAnenome” and “SoftVoss” are a representation of her desire to portray the potential of robots to behave realistically with life-like motions.
During the current pandemic, a lack of access to labs has made modular synthesizers even more elusive than usual to media arts students. But in a recent lecture hosted by UCSB’s Center for Research in Electronic Arts Technology, UCSB alumna, Jiayue Cecilia Wu, described how free, online software programs and a "student-centered" approach to teaching makes modular synthesis accessible to students. Wu now teaches at the University of Colorado Denver.
In the midst of a pandemic, UC Santa Barbara alumnus Marco Pinter has opened a new museum in Santa Barbara — the Museum of Sensory and Movement Experiences —which features work from other digital media artists affiliated with the university’s MAT graduate program. Pinter recently sat down for an interview with the HFA to discuss his work and the museum’s creation.
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 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.
In a recent virtual interview, Novak discussed the new undergraduate courses and the importance of cross-disciplinary connections to frame knowledge.
Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer and chief scientist of UC Santa Barbara’s revolutionary data visualization tool the AlloSphere. There Kuchera-Morin realized that the future of scientific research is having STEM fields collaborate with artists and composers.
A photographic record of roadside signage has put UC Santa Barbara art professor Alex Lukas in the company of artists who have responded to COVID-19 by visually interpreting this moment in time.
Published in The Boston Art Review’s winter 2021 edition, Lukas’ latest project “Stay Safe, Stay Home: Road Text in a Time of Contagion,” documents the emergence and progression of pandemic-related highway signs, capturing their language and appearance.
UCSB Professor and internationally-renowned data visualization artist George Legrady recently sat down for an interview to discuss how remote placement has affected the data visualization course he is offering in the Winter.
Stanford film professor Shane Denson spoke about his recent book Discorrelated Images for the Media Arts and Technology program’s Seminar series last week. He told a UCSB virtual audience that digital technologies bring us closer to the images we see in time and space and introduce an element of chance by regenerating moving images every time we see them.
Thanks to UC Santa Barbara’s Creative Computing Initiative, graduate student Kevin Whitesides incorporated hands-on multimedia projects in his Linguistics course Memes: When Language and Culture Go Viral . Donor Ross Dowd ‘94, has provided funds for Humanities and Fine Arts instructors and students to apply computer technology and digital tools to their areas of study.
In a seminar hosted by Media Arts and Technology science writer and and artist Margaret Wertheim discussed the intersection of math and art in a project started with her twin sister Christine Wertheim, called Crochet Coral Reef, where they use the craft of crochet to create sculptural representations of coral reefs. The project was an artistic response to climate change and exists at the nexus of art, science, math, and community engagement.
After a national competition, two recent PhD graduates from UCSB have been selected as Emerging Voices Fellows by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for 2020.
