Program Overview
Introduction to Emergent Digital Practices
The Emergent Digital Practices program (EDP) is a groundbreaking fusion of digital art, design, culture, and technology focused on building a better world. In EDP, our visionary work combines creative making and critical thinking. Our faculty and students seek to better understand emerging technologies and their impacts on cultures and ecologies. We use those technologies in a hands-on, collaborative environment to contribute to more meaningful and equitable communities.
Program Overview
We thrive at the intersection of the liberal arts, humanities, and sciences. Our faculty and students bring together inclusive digital design, electronic and new media arts and technology, and creative coding to contribute to our investigations of culture and society, the arts and sciences, media philosophy, science fiction, trans-global politics, and social justice.
Key Areas of Focus
- Creating interactive art and virtual worlds
- Engaging 3D world fabrication to create a call to social action
- Developing technological solutions for supporting creativity
Undergraduate Programs
Undergraduate students explore new digital technologies to develop creative projects informed by critical thinking through the BA, BFA or minor in Emergent Digital Practices.
BA and Minor
In the BA and minor, you'll learn about the ideas, cultures, and people that shape our current technological landscape alongside a second major or minor. You'll work in a collaborative environment, creating complex and expressive works with digital tools such as data visualizations, virtual reality experiences and immersive installations.
BFA
As a BFA student, you'll delve more deeply into these topics and extend your work into a fine arts-focused practice, developing works for public audiences in museums, galleries and other creative spaces.
Student Projects
Our students connect art, technology and design through critical research practices and creative projects. For example, BA student Ashley Kneemueller is an environmental scientist and digital artist whose work combines her two passions and criticizes the impacts of the Anthropocene on both ecological and human longevity. MFA student Cherish Marquez created an exploratory game, Slot of the Odds, which was featured at Redline Contemporary Art Center.
Community Connections
We foster numerous community connections that allow us to draw from the ingenuity and perspectives of a wider community while making major contributions of our own.
Alumni
Our alumni go on to careers in a vast array of different fields, from game design to interactive media to teaching in art and design. Our alumni are artists and educators, including Morehshin Allahyari, MA '09. Allahyari creates art in multiple media, including sculpture, installation, 3D printing and sound.
Mission
In Emergent Digital Practices, we are dedicated to creative and research practices at the leading edges of knowledge, art and technology for the public good. We are committed to practices that enable new strategies for dialogue and collaboration across a wide range of techno-cultural forms and disciplines.
Core Principles
- Creativity: Our approach to artistic & scholarly praxis encourages experimentation, innovation and the cultivation of new experiences for the public good.
- Critical Thinking: Our culturally oriented art, research & scholarship is driven by inclusive ethics, equal access to equitable technologies, environmental sustainability and global perspectives.
- Collaboration: Our model of working together inspires collegial interdisciplinarity, community-engagement, and long-term and sustainable partnerships from the local to the global.