Media Arts & Technology at UC Santa Barbara

Those who know me best know I’m a fan of Architecture, the Arts, and Technology.

The Media Arts & Technology Graduate Program at UC Santa Barbara has piqued my interest on more than one occasion. In the research spotlight at MAT is the AlloSphere. The AlloSphere is large sphere, ten meters in diameter, made of perforated aluminum, that is designed to provide multimodal representations of large-scale data in a fully immersive, 3D environment – think 3D, think surround sound, in a sphere. Amazing.

The following is a short excerpt from the MAT web site:

Media Arts and Technology (MAT) at UCSB is a transdisciplinary graduate program that fuses emergent media, computer science, engineering, and 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.

If you’re interested in art and aesthetics entering the science and technology sector, and it is doing so at an amazing pace, then MAT may deserve a second look.