Digital Arts Minor

The minor in Digital Arts at UC Irvine provides opportunities to explore creativity through forms of digital media. The program is open to students from all areas of UCI who want to acquire a working knowledge of how work using digital media is conceived, constructed, and performed. In the studio, students receive hands-on experience with current software tools, creating and sharing digital art projects, developing an appreciation of digital aesthetics and conceptual design, and learning the fundamentals of desktop video, audio, and web authoring software. Lectures and discussions examine how today’s pervasive digital culture evolves through interdisciplinary collaborations among artists, engineers, scientists, and scholars. Course work considers relationships between digital media practices, touching on such areas as social networking, video/audio podcasting, interface design, digital music, telematic performance, intelligent agents, virtual realities, artificial life, and ubiquitous computing. The program investigates critical issues related to emerging technologies and the arts, and surveys recent works by leading digital media artists.

In 2013, the campuswide Digital Arts Minor came under the oversight of the Art Department (it had previously been housed at the school level). From 2014 to 2019, it was directed by EAD faculty member Prof. Jesse Colin Jackson, and then from 2019 to 2023 by EAD faculty member Prof. Antoinette LaFarge. Prof. Jackson resumed the directorship in 2023. Below are the courses listed in the minor.

Each of the courses below may be taken one time only for credit toward the minor, with the exception of ‘topics vary’ courses such as ART 95 and Art 100. Specific ART 95 and ART 100 courses require approval from the Director of the Digital Arts minor to count towards the minor. Two courses in the minor may be taken Pass/Not Pass.

“A” COURSES (3 of these)

  • Arts 1: Arts Core
  • Art 1C: Art in Context: History, Theory, and Practice
  • Art 8: Changing Creativity
  • Art 12A: Art, Design, and Electronic Culture
  • Art 12B: From Steam to Steampunk
  • Art 12C: Intelligences of Arts

“B” COURSES (4 of these)

(any of the following)

  • Art 50A: Matter and Media
  • Art 50B: Interaction and Experience
  • Art 65A: Foundations in Media Design
  • Art 65B: Foundations in Internet Art and Design
  • Art 65C: Gizmology and Kinetics
  • Art 71B: Introduction to Photography II
  • Art 81A: Video Production
  • Art 81B: Video Stage Production
  • Art 95: Special Topics in Basic Media (when topic is related to digital arts)
  • Art 100: Special Topics (when topic is related to digital arts)
  • Art 106A: Programming for Artists
  • Art 106C: Design for Print
  • Art 110A: Mechatronic Art I
  • Art 113: How to Be Clever with Stuff
  • Art 126B: Issues in Techno-Arts
  • Art 130A: Projects in New Technologies
  • Arts 75: Digital Media: Exhibition
  • Dance 163: Dance and Video Technology
  • Dance 164: Screendance
  • Music 51: Music Technology and Computers
  • Music 147: Studies in Music Technology
  • Music 151: Computer Music Composition
  • Music 152: Interactive Arts Programming
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