Faculty

Full-time faculty present and past for the EAD area in the Department of Art at UC Irvine include:

CURRENT FACULTY

Antoinette LaFargeAntoinette LaFarge
Professor, Art Department
Affiliated Faculty, UCI Center in Law, Society & Culture

Antoinette’s beat is virtuality and its discontents. Her lifelong obsession with virtuality began with make-believe and fiction and expanded to include anything to do with the internet, avatars, and impersonation. For the past decade or so, she has been creating work in the areas of mixed-reality performance and installation, including such projects as Far-Flung follows function (2013), Galileo in America (2012), Hangmen Also Die (2010), Playing the Rapture (2008), Demotic (2004, 2006), The Roman Forum Project (2003), and Reading Frankenstein (2003). She co-curated two early exhibitions on computer games and art: “ALT+CTRL: A Festival of Independent and Alternative Games” (2003) and “SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art” (2000) at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology. She was the founder and longtime artistic director of the Plaintext Players, a pioneering Internet performance troupe founded in 1993 that appeared at numerous international venues, including the 1997 Venice Biennale, documenta X, and UpStage festivals. She has also published widely on subjects related to internet culture and impersonation.
Her home website is: antoinettelafarge.com
She blogs at:
art is all we have
Difference Engines

mug, dynamo bugeye smlSimon Penny
Professor, Art Department.
Faculty Affiliate – Newkirk Center for Science & Society.
Courtesy Faculty appt, Informatics Dept., School of ICS.

Simon Penny has worked as an artist, theorist, teacher and organiser in Digital Cultural Practices, Embodied Interaction, Interactive and Robotic Art for 25 years. His works involve custom robotic and sensor systems including novel machine vision systems. His art and writing address critical issues arising around enactive and embodied interaction, informed by traditions of practice in the arts including sculpture, video-art, installation and performance, and by ethology, cognitive science, phenomenology, human-computer interaction,  robotics, critical theory, cultural studies, media studies and Science and Technology Studies. He edited Critical Issues in Electronic Media (SUNY press 1995) and founded the Arts Computation Engineering interdisciplinary graduate program (ACE) at University of California, Irvine in 2003. He was director of Digital Art and Culture  conference 2009 (DAC09). He was previously Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He teaches in the Cognitive Science and Interactive Media masters at University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain and directs the Synergies interdisciplinary research and pedagogy project for EU project Softcontrol.  More at simonpenny.net

Recent Video interviews and talks available online:
Society for Research in Higher Education, London UK. Keynote (May 2014)
Code, Morphology and Behavior workshop at ENSAD Paris (April 2014)
Grid Spinoza interview
What is Artful Cognition? paper for Exploratorium conference Art as a Way of Knowing
Artist’s talk at Engineering Design Institute, Northwestern University (2010)

Jesse Colin JacksonJesse Colin Jackson
Assistant Professor, Art Department

Jesse Jackson came to UC Irvine from OCAD in Canada, where he was on the Faculty of Design. He has a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Toronto, and a B.A.Sc. in civil engineering from the University of British Columbia. His artistic work ranges across sculpture, 3D printing, photography, design, and related areas.  He is  in the process of setting up a new 3D printing and laser-cutting lab in the Art Department. For more about his work and background, check out his website. Jesse is the director of the campuswide Digital Arts Minor (DAM),  which is now housed in the Art Department.

His home website is: www.jessecolinjackson.com

ADJUNCT FACULTY

Bryan Jackson, Lecturer in Video

Stefani Byrd, Lecturer in New Media


FORMER FACULTY

Robert Nideffer [1998-2013]
Professor, Art Department
Director, UCI Game Culture and Technology Lab
Affiliated faculty, Visual Studies Program
Affiliated faculty, Information and Computer Science

Beatriz da Costa [2003-2012]
Associate Professor, Studio Art
Affiliated faculty, Culture and Theory Ph.D.
Affiliated faculty, Center for Ethnography
Affiliated faculty, Center for Complex Biological Systems

David Burns, Lecturer in Video and New Media (2007-09)

Jenny Cool, Lecturer in New Media (2008-2012)

Brett Doar, Lecturer in Sculpture (2010-11)

Chris Hanson, Lecturer in New Media (2005-06)

Jeff Knowlton, Lecturer in New Media (2006-07)

K. McCarty, Lecturer in New Media (2006-07)

A. Schwartz Lecturer in New Media (2005-07)

In addition, Art faculty in areas like Photography and Video teach courses of great value to EAD students. For more information about Art faculty, check out the department’s website.

Faculty in the Dance, Drama, and Music departments who work in areas related to EAD include John Crawford and Lisa Naugle (interactive dance), Sheron Wray (improvisational and locative media), and Chris Dobrian (electronic music), among others.

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