May 26, 2000
Arts initiative to emphasize 'technoculture'
By Lisa Klionsky
The Arts Vision Initiative -- the latest in the campus’s ongoing series of interdisciplinary initiatives -- will focus on studies of the intersections between arts, culture and technology, says Elizabeth Langland, dean of the humanities, arts and cultural studies division.
At the heart of the arts initiative will be the Center for Technocultural Studies, which will be research-based but include a curricular component, Langland says. She says that 10 positions have been made available for the initiative.
The Arts Vision initiative stems from campuswide planning that took place in the late 1990s when 10 cross-disciplinary initiatives were identified, including initiatives for the environment, genomics, mind sciences, nano-phases and the hemispheric study of the Americas.
The arts initiative was sought to help the campus strengthen academic programs in the creative arts, as well as to help broaden campuswide collaboration to other areas, including engineering and the physical sciences.
The technocultural studies center would house at least four programs, including digital studies, hypertext-hypermedia studies, visual culture and a program in artistic intervention and site-specific performance. Langland says she hopes to have a center director hired within the next year and to be able to be advertising center programs to prospective students by a year from now.
The center would draw some of its concept from already established programs at other UC campuses, but also would be tailored to UC Davis, Langland says. "We are incorporating the humanities and the arts, and we will have the dimension of arts intervention and site-specific work, which are quite unusual features."
Faculty members are exploring and gathering information to create a center appropriate for UC Davis. They comprise a steering committee that represents the arts, humanities, physical sciences, engineering, and agricultural and environmental sciences. As part of the committee work, art historian Blake Stimson and studio artist Conrad Atkinson are coordinating visits to campus by digital-arts professionals -- including practitioners, historians, theorists, computer experts, curators and critics. The committee plans to visit and evaluate model programs elsewhere.
Specifically, the center programs are planned as follows:
- Digital studies’ curricular programs for undergraduates and graduate students would include courses in digital photography, printmaking and cinema, telerobotics and artificial intelligence. This program would build on innovative work in digital culture currently represented by Lynn Hershman’s Interdisciplinary Electronic Arts (IDEA) lab and by computer-generated music composed by Wayne Slawson and Pablo Ortiz.
- Hypertext-hypermedia studies would explore the implications of new technologies for composition and literacy in an increasingly multicultural society. It would enable faculty members to do research and students to benefit from a range of Internet and Web-based teaching strategies.
- The program in visual culture would likely consist of a set of core courses focused on visual aesthetics, on the relation between technology and visual perception, on the moving image’s impact on culture, and on the meaning of performance and interactivity. The program would rely on new technologies and their creative possibilities even as it would examine and critique their implications for our public and private lives.
- The program in artistic intervention and site-specific performance would address the challenge of representing and articulating the centrality of the arts to daily life and to the performance of civic responsibilities. It would include such components as site-specific works such as dance and music performance on campus. "This center is intended not only to explore the creative intersections of art and culture with emerging technologies but also to evaluate the significance and to question the meaning of those technologies in our ongoing lives," Langland says.
Dateline UC Davis is the faculty and staff newspaper for the University of California, Davis.