Q1 Would you describe your program and its history?

New media art forms are rapidly maturing into an integral part of the landscape of contemporary arts research in academia. The emergence of these technology based art forms are radically challenging many of our most basic notions about art and culture -- what it means as practicing artists to be cultural producers, what constitutes a cultural object or aesthetic experience, and what skill sets and conceptual strategies are required for the artist, critic and audience to understand and integrate the importance of this new work in the future.

As these new arts categories continue to evolve and traditional disciplines become redefined in light of these changes, in 1998 the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley targeted their first hire full-time in a decade specifically to establishing a major new research effort in this area, and to facilitate the development and swift introduction of long overdue digital arts research into the departmental and campus community and curriculum.

Like most start-up areas, an extraordinary amount of time, energy and focus has been spent on building the research infrastructure and working relationships critical to achieving and sustaining a world class program in digital media at Berkeley. With little precedent on campus for this emerging arts area, we started from scratch with the design and construction of the laboratories and networks, organizing new computing and technology equipment purchases, and facilitating the building of cross-disciplinary campus connections central to research in this discipline. This foundational work was done quickly and carefully, and within the programs first two years. Each aspect of this new initiative has been done in a way that allowed campus and systemwide feedback in the process, and it is being continually refined and managed as we moved the department toward our strategic goals in this area.

The program beginning to be designed at UC Berkeley is a broad based interdisciplinary research environment dedicated to the pioneering of alternative tools, methods and thought processes involved in the creation of new and experimental technology art genres. It is designed to present students with both a critical review of emerging media technologies (understanding of how new media technology impacts art, society and culture), and to encourage the development of practical skills that embody those ideas through personal expression, creative experimentation, and imaginative risk taking (the practice of creating art where technology can be used in more poetic, humane and creative ways). Questioning the nature of art, personalizing the impact of technology, and inventing news forms of art propositions is the central focus of the course work.

Current courses and curricular topics under development for 2000 - 2001 include Digital Film/Video, Telematic Studio, Modeling and Animation, Media and Web Design, Human Machine Interface and Spatial Imaging. These time-based digital media courses are project-driven and active learning environments that emphasize interdisciplinary and collaborative arts research approaches. They help demonstrate the artistic possibilities of technology by studying the pioneering work of artists around the world who work with concepts, tools, and information contexts not usually defined as art, and also encourage students to reconsider the interrelationships of science, technology, media, and culture, and to integrate the skills of monitoring scientific research and emerging technologies as they relate to potentially important art production in the future.

Two new lecturer positions have recently been filled to broaden our course offerings and to begin exploring more systematically issues of agency, database aesthetics, machine consciousness, artificial intelligence, complex and evolving systems, designs for distributed communication and information networks, and immersive environments.

>> How your new media art endeavor's positioned within the academic structure at your University?

The digital arts faculty and curriculum on campus are essentially positioned as an arena for meta-disciplinary practitioners who also theorize and critique their own practice in relation to its technological, cultural, and social implications. Emphasis is placed on creating a natural bridge across the traditional disciplinary divide between the humanities and the sciences. Through the drive to create new technologies, and re-purpose existing ones to innovative artistic and intellectual ends, our digital artists by definition adopt highly interdisciplinary models of research, often spanning a range of research and development interests oriented toward practical creative production. Through these broad hybridization digital artists we are generating great enthusiasm within the university, the corporate sector, and the public at large. Yet because of this we are still frequently misunderstood and traditional academic analysis to site this new work conceptually, culturally, and historically has been difficult. Such interdisciplinary dialogue between creative production and programmatic development is precisely how our research and teaching programs are being created.

Q2 What degrees do you offer?

Currently we offer BFA's and MFA's with concentration in Digital Media. As our program and faculty base grow, there will very likely be a new degree designation for the area, as well as joint Ph.D's offered with allied arts and science areas. Also, the UC Presidents Office has just funded the multi-campus research group UC Digital Arts Research Network (UC DARNet). DARNet is an interdisciplinary multi-campus group of UC faculty who utilize digital media in their creative production. As an ad-hoc planning group formed from the Presidents Digital Arts Planning Group, DARNet has been meeting since 1997 to lay the foundation for a UC-wide program to facilitate collaborative research and teaching within distributed digital arts community. With this new funding UC DARNet will over a five year period lay the technical and conceptual infrastructure for the UC to establish a systemwide digital arts program.

Q3 Computers and networks are profoundly conceptual media in the context of literature and the arts. Yet there is also a seemingly unavoidable necessity for students to learn technology skills in a constantly changing technological environment. This seems to demand both a very theoretical/art-historical approach to teaching as well as a need for high-tech education. Does your program have a specific approach to pedagogy in new media arts, especially as pertains to the balance or blending of theoretical and technical instruction?

Discussed above.

Q4 Theorists and practicing artists approach new media and network media from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Film and cinema theory, communications studies, literature, linguistics and semiology, fine art, activist art, computer science, information science, engineering, philosophy, biology, and other fields are platforms of theory and practice which have influenced new media and/or technology art. Which interdisciplinary approaches are most influential in your program, and how is your program integrated with other departments or programs at your institution?

Both our course focus and student composition are highly interdisciplinary. Though the courses are offered under the aegis of the Department of Art Practice, they are 75% non-art majors from every possible field of study at the University. Strategic research alliances in the area include fine art, film studies, theater arts, computer science, rhetoric, information science, and engineering.

In February, 2000, the Digital Media Program co-sponored CRASH: the Berkeley Symposium on Critical Issues in Net Art. Sponsored by grants from the Berkeley Consortium for the Arts, the Department of Art Practice, the Berkeley Art Museum, the College of Engineering, and the InterCampus Arts Association, the symposium devoted its energies toward identifying critical, aesthetic, and art historical issues raised by the emergence of a new form of art, "net.art": art specific to the Internet. The Symposium was designed to bring together an interdisciplinary group of art historians, theorists and critics who had little prior exposure to net.art, and engage in an open dialogue to discuss how and if this new genre of work can be sited, conceptually, critically and historically. During the first evening of the symposium, Steve Dietz, a curator at the Walker Art Center and an authority on net art, presented a campus wide lecture on a cross section of net art projects, and the participants in public and private sessions. Net based artists visited the campus for the symposium and simultaneously gave public lectures to the campus community, and workshops in other arts and science disciplines. An edited transcription of the symposium dialogue will be compiled and published both on the web and in print this Summer 2000. Some of the invitees included, David Ross, SF MOMA, Hal Foster, Princeton, Steve Dietz, Walker Art Center, Patricia Failing, University of Washington, Peter Lunenfeld, Art Center, Pasadena, Anne Wagner, Martin Jay, Heidi Zuckerman-Jacobson, Randolph Starn, from UCB, Victoria Vesna, from UCLA, and Lev Manovich, from UCSD.

Q5 How does your program engage with and relate to the traditional institutional artworld of museums and other art institutions?

Critical to sustaining and extending the dialogue of emerging technology research our digital media students are encouraged to simultaneously question the validity of traditional venues for exhibiting emerging work, as well as engage with close working relationships with many Bay Area museums including our own Berkeley Art Museum, and Pacific Film Archives. These engagements include ongoing outside student research projects that pose these questions. This past year we worked closely with Steven Seid, curator of video at the PFA to speak to our classes and show new and historical video work from the archive, as well as sponsor the very first premiere of experimental student "digital videos" from the Department of Art Practice at the Pacific Film Archives. A broad range of student work selected by the PFA curators from our Art 160 Digital Video course was shown in December at the new home of the Archive on Bancroft. The premiere screened 15 to 20 new student works plus offered a post show question and answer session with student film makers responding to the public.

Concurrently this past Fall we organized an opportunity for the digital media students to assist resident French artist Valery Grancher, in constructing his new "24Hr00" internet project commissioned by the Berkeley Art Museum. 24 Art Practice students were asked to take a photographic portrait every hour, on the hour for one entire day. Each photo would be accompanied by a single word that described their feelings at the moment. The images were scanned and coded into a grid on the museum web site, where visitors could then construct over 600,000 24 frame sequences of temporal possibilities from these images. The web site allows viewers to choose the time, an individual or their state of mind in the project to generate a kind of short web-based filmic montage of a day in the life of these Berkeley art students. Along with their attendance at his public lecture, Grancher was also invited by the students to join us in class for a discussion of his work and their intimate participation in the collaborative design of his project.

This Spring digital media students in the Department Art Practice at UC Berkeley and museum studies students at Sonoma State University Art Department collaborated on a project entitled CU, using the Internet and digital video to explore: how personal and social meaning is conveyed through art objects, their presentation in gallery installations, and their representation in electronic media; and how art can be a locus for interaction - multiple exchanges of meaning between many different agents from gallery visitor to museum cataloger. Students began by interacting anonymously via the Internet (a typical mode of interaction on this medium), using assumed identities to explore the roles of multiple different agents (artist, gallery visitor, critic/historian). Berkeley students created art works based on the notion of collections and installed them in the Worth Ryder Gallery. They reinterpreted the art using web-cams to create digital videos. Sonoma students viewed the digital videos online to uncover traces of meaning about the work and the artist. They responded via the website by writing a poetic personal response to the work, creating a museum catalog record for the work, and then creating a profile of the artist, all based only on the evidence of the online video. After these series of interactions, the students met in the gallery for the first time to see how viewing the works through the "lenses" of different art agents and different technologies extended, informed, or changed their interaction with the art and with each other.

Also, in collaboration with Berkeley's newly formed Consortium for the Arts and Cal Performances, the digital media area helped organize graduate arts faculty and their students from around the UC system to come to Berkeley and engage in a hands-on performance-demonstration of Merce Cunningham's groundbreaking digital dance notation project "Biped". Funding from Autodesk and the ICA supported both the production and travel funds to bring representatives from other UC campuses to the Berkeley performance, as well as the research events planned around Cunningham's visit during the weekend of April 23-25, 1999.

Cunningham's company performed twice at Berkeley, and offered open rehearsals on Saturday afternoon to arts students and faculty. The accompanying demonstration event was on Sunday. The event was important, because Autodesk's Kinetix Character Studio Software allowed the creation of a new notation technique and dance construction in virtual space. It also presented the broad range of research possibilities integrating live performance and virtual environments that has a unique potential in the digital arts. Discussion at the demonstration consisted of dialogue on what this innovation involves for dance, on the relations between technology, agency and the body as instrument in traditional performing arts, and on the models of aesthetic judgment that we bring to such work.

Q6 Do you receive industry support or maintain relationships with companies who are interested in your graduates?

Yes, we have received all levels of major grants and awards to support emerging technology research in digital media including: The Boxlight Corporation, The National Institute of Health, The Intel Corporation, Silicon Graphics, Newport/Klinger Research Corporation, Apple Computer, IBM GmbH, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Leica and Hughes Aircraft.

Q7 Can you describe the type of studio work that your digital media students are primarily engaged in, and is theory and writing an important component of your program?

Exceptionally broad and ranges from physical computing and telepresence projects, to more typical technology based works in performance, installation, net art and video.

Q8 Is there anything that is important for prospective students to understand about your program that may assist them in choosing a place of study?

Concurrent with the projected increase in campus enrollment over the next decade, the art department has already noticed an extraordinary jump in the numbers of students wanting to enroll in our courses, and most importantly the request for majors (these are up 100% this last semester). The Department attributes this both to the beginning of revitalization of the department with a new hire, and an increased awareness by the student body and culture at large that the unique intellectual discovery and metadisciplinary approaches provided in the visual arts translates into an important strategy in the culture of innovation. It is this perception that the arts are where highly original research is nurtured and developed, and students understand that this is specifically where they can begin to stake out new cultural territory in an increasingly visual culture.

The revitalized art department model we are developing is a realistically sized, intensely interdisciplinary department with faculty expertise in many areas in and outside the arts. The new model will be intricately woven into the research fabric of the total university enterprise, including complex research alliances throughout the campus. Because of our current size and the growing demand for integrated digital arts education, an across the board increase of full-time fte's and staff is being sought. This increase will help us shore up the standing commitments we currently have, and help us quickly develop important research alliances with other arts and sciences units on campus and throughout the system. Along with these potential new hires, we are committed to developing joint faculty programs with other collaborating units including; engineering, dance, drama, music, architecture, rhetoric, etc.

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