DXARTS: Digital Arts & Experimental Media University of Washington

With access to state-of-the-art facilities and a vibrant, multidisciplinary community, you are free to pursue innovative projects that defy categorization. This open-minded approach fosters a culture of fearless artistic discovery, where boundaries between disciplines blur and new musical expressions emerge. Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) is a revolutionary new model of creative practice, research, and discovery at the frontier of the arts. Designed to support the emergence of a new generation of hybrid artists, DXARTS fosters the invention of new forms of digital and experimental arts by synthesizing expanded studio research with pioneering advances in digital computing, information technologies, science, and engineering.

Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFA)

Our programs combine a stylistically open approach to creativity with rigorous technical instruction, individualized mentoring, and professional-development training. Innovation across an unrivaled diversity of styles is a hallmark of The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts, where musicians are empowered to expand the boundaries of received practice and to develop distinctive artistic voices that will stand out in the musical crowd. The plan drawn up by Lucio Costa for the new capital adopted concepts and instruments of urban and regional planning in vogue at that period. It was based on the creation of a central nucleus with an orderly layout and limited dimensions – the Plano Piloto – implicitly presupposing growth through satellite cities also ordered and in the midst of a green belt. Furthermore, experimental art often draws on the same materials that non-experimental art does. How many self-professed avant-garde movements turned out to have little or even no effect on the rest of the culture?

The primary focus of doctoral education in Digital Arts and Experimental Media is to create opportunities for artists to discover and document new knowledge and expertise at the most advanced levels higher education can offer. The DXARTS Ph.D. is an intersection of creativity and research-oriented program of study requiring a substantial commitment to graduate-level study and reflection. The Ph.D. degree prepares artists to pursue original creative and technical research in Digital Arts and Experimental Media and pioneer lasting innovations on which future artists and scholars can build. The experimental artist wants her artwork to be different from all the other artworks around her.

Students and studios meet at Animation Portfolio Day

The Experimental Animation MFA program at CalArts offers a framework in which students explore, develop, and refine intellectually demanding, aesthetically progressive concepts and professional practices in their personal cinematic art-making. Learn about our approach to the full development of the creative abilities of visual and performing artists. Experimental Art & Technology at the University of New Mexico is an interdisciplinary experimental program within the Department of Art. Students are expected to make work that comments on, engages with, and expands our notions of what technology based art can be through courses that explore high tech immersive environments alongside consumer electronic hacking and simple analog circuit building. At CalArts, students and world-class faculty work together in a vigorous performance culture in which opportunities for collaborations with musicians, filmmakers, animators, dancers, theater directors, actors, and writers flourish. Their stories tell of a periphery undergoing rapid transformation, suggesting that either the area would be tolerated or ignored by the authorities or it would become a target for control measures and attempts to impose urban planning..“people worked a lot but they moved around a lot, too.

Studio production is coupled with critical inquiry into the relationship between art, technology, politics, society and culture. “there was a togetherness, you saw someone building their shack, it was (bang, bang, bang), the noise of the hammer all day long and all night long, but whoever finished first turned up to help” (Adair José de Lima, 2005). “We used to live there in the town called Vila do IAPI, four mates, all nearby, next door to each other. It was a nuisance but we wanted to all stay together here in Ceilândia but we all got split up” (Francisco das Chagas Nogueira, 2002). Those migrants who moved to Brasilia in search of work on the building sites clearly recall the climate of enthusiasm at that time but they also talk about the anxieties and difficulties facing them both then and now. The very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound of the wind blowing through the chinks and all around the log cabin in Idaho where I was born.

Our mission is to support and empower new generations of artists who reimagine our emerging relationships with new technologies. As a department, DXARTS challenges current trends, develops new approaches to artistic discovery, embraces diversity, and looks towards the future while critically engaging with traditional forms. We strive to probe the unknown through experimentation across media and disciplines. The philosophy of the program is guided by a belief in the intersection of personal artistic work with interpretive knowledge and of the relevance of the individual documentary/experimental artist within the cultural history and life of communities. A key component to the program is the notion of creative engagement through the arts and the role of the artist in society.

Furthermore, this view of experimental art does not require that the art or artist do anything new per se; it requires only that the art and artist be out of step with the dominant techniques and styles of the moment, preferring the unfamiliar to the familiar. (This helps explain why outsider art, née Art Brut, is often valued by experimentalists.) And this definition is comfortable with artworks like The Matrix or Harry Potter, which it admits employ innovative and unfamiliar concepts and styles, but doesn’t go on to claim as experimental. The innovations in those works are relatively minor features in regard to the whole, and ultimately dominated by other, familiar aspects of the work—more recognizable forms and concepts. Rowling’s innovations lie in hybridizing genre, and not with, say, grammar (a la Stein) or novel structure (a la Cortázar). To be considered for the BFA Experimental Animation program, you must complete an application and all program-specific requirements, including an artist statement, portfolio, video introduction, additional written materials, letters of recommendation, and an interview. Before applying, please familiarize yourself with the detailed application requirements and resources available to assist you in this important process.

Each year, experimental art program the School of Film/Video produces a directory featuring portfolios and contact info for current Experimental Animation students to help connect industry professionals with CalArts talent.