Act Lab

http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/

USA

A unique group of international and interdisciplinary artists, teachers, techies, and hackers. We situate our work at the hotly contested intersections where technology, art, and culture collide. Our uniqueness comes from our unusual courses, our custom multimodal studio specifically designed for ACTLab work, the special qualities of our community and participants, the guiding vision of our directors, visiting artists and lecturers, and our students' broad spectrum of interests and projects.

-- Develop your skills using ACTLab principles of intensive discussion, conceptual freeplay, and intellectual daring. Working in the ACTLab's technology-rich environment, you will master cutting edge hardware and software with an eye toward new ways of representing your work. We encourage unconventional approaches, flexibility, and multidisciplinarity, not only for their intrinsic worth, but because multiple knowledge sets are what you need to thrive in an era of exponential change.

-- Learn by study and example to translate your research into advanced media, emergent technology, sound, movement, performance, and other dynamic modes of representation.

-- Become a member of the ACTLab's international community of award-winning researchers, entrepreneurs, performers, artists, and scholars.

-- Share their advice and experience via ACTLab mailing lists, workshops,and personal encounters.

Your final work, besides being an exploration and/or refinement of your semester's theoretical studies, will be an original contribution to the development of transdisciplinary approaches to research, redefining the scholarly mission, and exploring new pedagogy for the twenty-first century university.

We're aware and proud of our past fourteen years of contributions to modern thinking, advanced communication theory and practice, and academic excellence. We're proud to say that we didn't jump on the New Media bandwagon -- we created it.

The ACTLab is shaped and distinguished by the extraordinarily diverse backgrounds and skill sets of its faculty, students, and guests. From its inception, the ACTLab has been a major international presence in defining the nature and direction of new transdisciplinary organizations. ACTLab principles of risk-taking, extreme interdisciplinarity, and openness to innovation have been extensively quoted and debated at institutions worldwide as they attempt to chart their own future courses.

ACTLab courses are concept-driven, rather than skills-driven; but we believe that theory flows from the act of making, rather than the other way around. The point of each ACTLab course is to help you define, develop, and produce a project that reflects on the social, cultural, aesthetic, political, and personal issues raised in that particular class. For undergraduates and for masters students doing projects and reports, our aim is to teach you critical thinking about media and technology and to help you develop a portfolio of representative projects to take with you when you graduate. For masters students doing theses and doctoral students, our goal is to quicken your appreciation of technology's foibles and potentials, but to ask research questions that interconnect with these technologies and their social, economic, aesthetic, political, and personal environments.

We offer you the opportunity to engage cutting-edge technologies, but we also encourage you to view these as tools rather than as ends in themselves. Make sure you're taking advantage of technology, rather than waking up to find that technology is taking advantage of you. That's why we encourage critical thinking, and offer you the opportunity to engage cutting-edge theory along with making.

ACTLab courses have a broad range and allow for multiple topics. You can taste a course or two or work intensively over time, and even repeat courses because course topics always change.