Academics

Overview

Creative Technologies (CT) is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program in the Arts Division, with participating faculty in Art, Music, and PPD (Performance, Play, and Design). 

Students in Creative Technologies obtain a degree that emphasizes emerging arts and design technologies, learning to use a variety of design and art practices in digital environments. Our curriculum aims to serve as a nurturing nexus for justice, community, imagination, humor, activism, and joy. The program combines online and in-person modalities to allow UCSC Arts students to transcend departments and genres, transcend the physical space of the campus, and bridge geographically and economically remote communities.

Creative Technologies, whose first students will be enrolling in the fall of 2024, is the first online undergraduate major program in the University of California system.

Learning experience

The Creative Technologies major builds three main emphases:

1. Literacy in tools for creative expression

Students complete coursework that builds both literacy and ethics in the languages and tools of contemporary media technology. From creative coding to advanced software environments for media production, students are taught to create with confidence and fluency, while framing their skills with pressing questions of technology’s deeper purposes and responsibilities.

2. Media studies

Students explore histories and cultures of media, exposing and critiquing a deep genealogy of the diverse and often invisible struggles – including struggles for decolonization, racial justice, environmental justice, justice against misogyny, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, and oligarchy – in which design, arts, and technology innovation have unfolded.

3. Production and collaboration practices

Students take coursework that cultivates practices of production and collaboration that bring complex projects to fruition: how to communicate to get good work done together, and how to navigate the platforms and venues in which sound and image, games, experimental performance art, documentary media, archival media and oral history, and other projects, can be brought to a wide and inquisitive public.

These three emphases, and the community of faculty, students, and staff, are knit together with a unique, hybrid-modality, three-quarter colloquium, bringing in-person learning together with distinguished local and remote voices – visiting artists representing some of the most exciting achievements in the global landscape of creativity and technology.