ArtsVision Initiative: Center for Technocultural Studies

The ArtsVision initiative focuses on research and teaching at the intersection of the arts/humanities and technology. This initiative is founded on the recognition that research in the twenty-first century will need to emphasize creativity and the humanities in relation to scientific and technological advances. The initiative will take form in a Center for TechnoCultural Studies. By stimulating cutting-edge research, this Center will encourage new undergraduate and graduate degree programs, enable new industry partnerships, and take advantage of new external grant and funding opportunities. Ten FTEs have been committed to the initiative, one from engineering and nine from HARCS.

UC Davis will invest in additional faculty who explore the creative intersections of arts and technology as well as of humanities and technology. These faculty would be housed in several departments and programs but would come together in a Center for TechnoCultural Studies. The ArtsVision will simultaneously bring in faculty who would join with others here in examining how emerging technologies are transforming the very definitions of communication, community, and culture. It has become increasingly important to investigate the implication of such dramatic social change and reflexively to engage the university as a space for democratic dialogue and humanistic inquiry. This strand of the initiative would encourage exploring through performance, the creative arts, and scholarship the meaning of human life and the significance of political/cultural practices in a technologically sophisticated global world.

Artists who work with digital media for research, education, and creative cultural production, humanists who examine the social and cultural implications of new information and communication technologies, and scientists who build the infrastructure that supports such creative production, all share an obligation to help others to gain access to the tools and discourse involved in understanding their power. At a time when computers and network technologies are transforming definitions of society, community and culture, university faculty from all disciplines must increasingly collaborate on strategies to integrate and distill the implications of this dramatic change. As a community, faculties also have, more than ever before, a professional obligation reflexively and critically to engage the university as a space for democratic dialogue and humanistic inquiry. For UC Davis to fail this challenge is to be left behind in the next century.