The Department of Critical Media Practices graduate program is comprised of a PhD in Emergent Technologies and Media Arts Practices and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Documentary Media Practices in addition to graduate certificates in the field. The PhD is a four-year fully funded practice-led program of scholarly research into new and evolving creative practices rooted in innovations in art and technology, aesthetics and theories of cultural production, representation and embodiment.
The program is predicated upon the integration of theory and practice, and is situated in the interstices of humanities, arts and computational technologies. Its interdisciplinary and transcultural approach to creative practices and knowledge production draws extensively from art and art history, moving image art, performance art, sonic studies, and immersive media platforms. The thread that integrates these disciplines into a unitary field of knowing and doing is a shared interest in the application of media computational technologies informed by critical/historical inquiry and research into how these technologies are reconfiguring media arts production and art practices while also forging innovative forms of artistic collaborations, and creating reflective, critical, and culturally engaged scholar/artists for the 21st century.
The MFA is a two-year program that seeks to meaningfully integrate documentary forms, theories, practices, and aesthetic thinking through the lens of interdisciplinary research to produce new modes of interpretation, critical reflection, and knowledge production. The program explores the histories of documentary practices and their contemporary forms across all media-making platforms, including photography, performance art, moving images, and VR/AR in transnational contexts with a focus on creative practices as vectors for thinking through theory and aesthetics. The program’s approach to experimentation with a variety of forms is designed to expand the documentary canvas, discover new modes of storytelling and research, as well as utilize emerging technologies and platforms to critically engage in visually focused methods of knowing and knowledge creation in our evolving transnational ecology of documentary practices.
