Media Arts and Technology (MAT) at UC Santa Barbara is a transdisciplinary graduate program that fuses emergent media, computer science, engineering, electronic music and digital art research, practice, production, and theory. Created by faculty in both the College of Engineering and the College of Letters and Science, MAT offers an unparalleled opportunity for working at the frontiers of art, science, and technology, where new art forms are born and new expressive media are invented.

In MAT, we seek to define and to create the future of media art and media technology. Our research explores the limits of what is possible in technologically sophisticated art and media, both from an artistic and an engineering viewpoint. Combining art, science, engineering, and theory, MAT graduate studies provide students with a combination of critical and technical tools that prepare them for leadership roles in artistic, engineering, production/direction, educational, and research contexts.

The program offers Master of Science, Master of Arts, and Ph.D. degrees in Media Arts and Technology. MAT students may focus on an area of emphasis (multimedia engineering, electronic music and sound design, or visual and spatial arts), but all students should strive to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and work with other students and faculty in collaborative, multidisciplinary research projects and courses.

MAT research interests include: transarchitectures and worldmaking, virtual and mixed realities, visualization, intelligent space and interactive/transactive installations, electronic and generative music synthesis, multi-channel spatialized sound, human-computer interaction, motion-capture and distributed sensing, digital signal processing, wireless broadband, algorithmic morphogenesis, digital sculpture and robotics, and more. The relationship of present to future media is of particular interest, especially as it relates to nanotechnology, biotechnology, new materials, and new fabrication methods. MAT has significant relationships with the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE), and several UCSB departments, especially Art, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Music.

Featured
Mojo: When Black Identity Shapes the Earth
Mojo: When Black Identity Shapes the Earth

Jeremy Kamal, Black culture scholar and professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, showed three futuristic, digitally-realized landscapes for a UC Santa Barbara audience. These landscapes, which are part of a fictional world called “Mojo,” each represent parts of Black identity.

Curtis Roads: A Sonic Narrative
Curtis Roads: A Sonic Narrative

Curtis Roads, professor and chair of Media Arts and Technology at UCSB, spoke to a Santa Barbara audience last week about his career in electronic music composition and music software development. During the lecture, he played some of his more recent pieces and updated his audience on future projects.

Premiere: An Eclectic Composition Created for the AlloSphere
Premiere: An Eclectic Composition Created for the AlloSphere

UC Santa Barbara’s AlloSphere hosted the premiere of “Musics Of The Spheres,” an experimental work by eclectic composer Robert Morris. His piece uses the full surround-sound capabilities of the AlloSphere to feature music from all across the globe.

Computerized Textiles Offer Emotional Support
Computerized Textiles Offer Emotional Support

Touch is the largest organ of our body, says Felicia Davis, professor of Architectural Design at Pennsylvania State University. Davis uses computer-manipulated textiles that change in response to their environment. The textiles could provide relief for people who have a hard time expressing or understanding their own emotions. Presented by the graduate program in Media, Arts and Technology, she discussed her project in a recent seminar.

Electronically Documenting COVID-19 Among Prisoners
Electronically Documenting COVID-19 Among Prisoners

Americans created a criminal punishment system based on the model of quarantine in which the poor and people of color are disproportionately isolated and contained, “treated as a pathogen,” Sharon Daniel, a professor at UC Santa Cruz and media artist, told the UCSB Media Arts and Technology (MAT) graduate program. Now, in the 21st century, the COVID-19, has both exposed and intensified the injustices of the criminal system, Daniel said as she walked through her interactive art documentary “EXPOSED: Documenting COVID-19 in the Criminal Punishment System.”


Using Robots to Turn Ocean Life into Art
Using Robots to Turn Ocean Life into Art

Yin Yu, a graduate student in UCSB’s Media Arts and Technology (MAT) program, debuted her 3D fusion of biology and technology recently at the Art Department’s Glassbox Gallery. Yu’s pieces “OctoAnenome” and “SoftVoss” are a representation of her desire to portray the potential of robots to behave realistically with life-like motions.

Connecting Students to Sound Design Technology
Connecting Students to Sound Design Technology

During the current pandemic, a lack of access to labs has made modular synthesizers even more elusive than usual to media arts students. But in a recent lecture hosted by UCSB’s Center for Research in Electronic Arts Technology, UCSB alumna, Jiayue Cecilia Wu, described how free, online software programs and a "student-centered" approach to teaching makes modular synthesis accessible to students. Wu now teaches at the University of Colorado Denver.

Media Art and Movement: A UCSB Alum Opens a Museum
Media Art and Movement: A UCSB Alum Opens a Museum

In the midst of a pandemic, UC Santa Barbara alumnus Marco Pinter has opened a new museum in Santa Barbara — the Museum of Sensory and Movement Experiences —which features work from other digital media artists affiliated with the university’s MAT graduate program. Pinter recently sat down for an interview with the HFA to discuss his work and the museum’s creation.

Creating the World: Transdisciplinary Connections in Virtual Space
Creating the World: Transdisciplinary Connections in Virtual Space

After a trial run back in 2017, the Media Arts and Technology (MAT) graduate program at UC Santa Barbara officially established undergraduate courses for the first time this academic year.

The series of courses, titled Mediated Worlds, are led by MAT graduate professor Marcos Novak, a virtual architect and the founder and director of the department’s transLAB research facility, which investigates how technology affects virtual space in art and science.

In a recent virtual interview, Novak discussed the new undergraduate courses and the importance of cross-disciplinary connections to frame knowledge.

The Future of Research: Merging Science with Music and Art
The Future of Research: Merging Science with Music and Art

Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer and chief scientist of UC Santa Barbara’s revolutionary data visualization tool the AlloSphere. There Kuchera-Morin realized that the future of scientific research is having STEM fields collaborate with artists and composers.

Artist Alex Lukas: Finding Meaning in a Pandemic
Artist Alex Lukas: Finding Meaning in a Pandemic

A photographic record of roadside signage has put UC Santa Barbara art professor Alex Lukas in the company of artists who have responded to COVID-19 by visually interpreting this moment in time.

Published in The Boston Art Review’s winter 2021 edition, Lukas’ latest project “Stay Safe, Stay Home: Road Text in a Time of Contagion,” documents the emergence and progression of pandemic-related highway signs, capturing their language and appearance.

Data Art in Cyberspace: George Legrady on Remote Learning
Data Art in Cyberspace: George Legrady on Remote Learning

UCSB Professor and internationally-renowned data visualization artist George Legrady recently sat down for an interview to discuss how remote placement has affected the data visualization course he is offering in the Winter.


Our Changing Relationship with Images
Our Changing Relationship with Images

Stanford film professor Shane Denson spoke about his recent book Discorrelated Images for the Media Arts and Technology program’s Seminar series last week. He told a UCSB virtual audience that digital technologies bring us closer to the images we see in time and space and introduce an element of chance by regenerating moving images every time we see them.

Of Memes, Linguistics and Creative Computing
Of Memes, Linguistics and Creative Computing

Thanks to UC Santa Barbara’s Creative Computing Initiative, graduate student Kevin Whitesides incorporated hands-on multimedia projects in his Linguistics course Memes: When Language and Culture Go Viral . Donor Ross Dowd ‘94, has provided funds for Humanities and Fine Arts instructors and students to apply computer technology and digital tools to their areas of study.

Coral Reefs and Climate Change: Learning Through Crochet
Coral Reefs and Climate Change: Learning Through Crochet

In a seminar hosted by Media Arts and Technology science writer and and artist Margaret Wertheim discussed the intersection of math and art in a project started with her twin sister Christine Wertheim, called Crochet Coral Reef, where they use the craft of crochet to create sculptural representations of coral reefs. The project was an artistic response to climate change and exists at the nexus of art, science, math, and community engagement.