Arts & Humanities

ATEC (Arts & Technology) Program

Innovations in digital arts and digital media have sparked an entrepreneurial revolution in media, film, entertainment, training and other industries, impacting every aspect of our daily lives.

The interdisciplinary Program in Arts and Technology focuses on the creation, application, and implications of technologically sophisticated interactive communication. Students may concentrate their studies on either Games and Interactive Narrative or Digital Arts and Design.

The arts and technology have a long history of mutually productive interaction. Technological advances create new opportunities and audiences for artistic expression. The imaginative visions of art, in turn, invite translation into objects that transform society. The interdisciplinary program, Art & Engineering, is devoted to studying and fostering this interaction, with specific emphasis on the interplay of visual art, music, and narrative with the new media that have emerged from the convergence of computing and media technologies. The program offers both undergraduate (B.A.) and graduate (M.A., M.F.A.) degrees.

The educational objective of the undergraduate major is to prepare students generally to understand and succeed in the media-rich, technologically sophisticated world of the 21st century; moreover, it will prepare students for a wide range of careers that involve digital content design and development. The graduate programs will offer advanced training and the opportunity to create and/or discover new practical applications for technologically based creativity. The doctoral program is designed to produce a new generation of scholars in an emerging field likely to have an impact on 21st-century culture and education analogous to that of film and Film Studies in the 20th century.

The degree is based on collaboration between the School of Arts & Humanities and the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Sciences. The core knowledge in this degree program draws from the convergence of research in the humanities, the creative and performing arts, visual communications design, computer science, and engineering. The curriculum focuses on a wide range of interactive content design, user-based development, and the interface between human beings and the computing environment.

The program provides students with a flexible, interdisciplinary context within which to pursue their studies, built on connections among specific courses and areas of interest. Within the specific degree plans, each student plans an individual program of studies in consultation with an assigned faculty advisor. Most courses for the M.A. and M.F.A. are offered under the rubric of Arts and Technology (ATEC), but the degree plan also include select courses in Aesthetic Studies (HUAS), History of Ideas (HUHI), and Studies in Literature (HUSL).