The Department of Media Study
is an experimental media arts program committed to providing both graduate and
undergraduate students a community in which they can develop their own voice
as artists. We have research groups in Independent Film and Video (including
Documentary), Robotics, Digital Art (including Net-based Art and Digital Poetics
), and Virtual Reality/Interactive Fiction and we
give students the flexibility both to work in these areas and to combine them
in unexpected ways. We are also guided by Marshall McLuhan's observation that
`media' comes from the Latin word for `public' and that media are inherently
social. We believe that media making should be aware of its cultural and theoretical
assumptions and be prepared to challenge these assumptions.
This department is strongly linked to artistic practices and conversations in
the departments of Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Comparative Literature, English,
Music, Theatre and Dance and the Center for the Americas. In addition, we participate
in an interdisciplinary program in Film Studies. We encourage our students to
combine their work in this department with study in other disciplines.
