Graduate Program

The research conducted in the program reflects the rapidly transforming knowledge systems and digital media economies emerging from the substantial technological shifts currently taking place in our society. Digital creative work and critical media literacy play a defining role in our information society and are transforming all aspects of contemporary life, including the way many professional visual artists, multimedia performers, writers, publishers, digital humanists and archivists pursue their practice.

Traditional scholarly and creative work outputs such as the single-authored print book or conventional gallery exhibitions have already been challenged by the emergence of multi-authored and/or hybridized forms of transmission such as Internet art sites, electronic literature, live audio/visual performance, multi-platform storytelling or transmedia narratives, software art, interactive installations for public spaces, augmented reality, game art, networked media activism and innovative art applications for mobile devices and tablets.

IAWP’s internationally renowned and affiliated faculty collaborate with graduate students probing the significance of a digitally expanded, process-based research environment located in a cluster of interdisciplinary research labs. The program provides a flexible pedagogical structure that will lead to the creation of new and hybridized forms of art, writing, performance, scholarship, theory, design, curation, exhibition and publication appropriate for our current cultural moment.

The program concentrates its curriculum on digital forms of creativity so as to cultivate cutting-edge investigations into the practice, theory, history and philosophy of media and its relationships to creativity, communication, technology and information.