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Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP)
IAWP is an interdisciplinary digital arts and humanities research unit with a practice-based PhD in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance. Core faculty collaboratively investigate past and present forms of digital art, writing and performance, and offer graduate students a hands-on, experience-based learning environment in which to explore emerging forms of creativity triggered by practice-based research methodologies. The research conducted in the program reflects the rapidly transforming knowledge systems and digital media economies generated by the substantial technological shifts currently taking place in our society.
IAWP-affiliated faculty work with top graduate student recruits to probe the significance of a digitally expanded and collaborative research environment located in a cluster of interdisciplinary research labs. Using hands-on collaborative forms of lab-based research that feed teaching while also drawing on it, IAWP provides a flexible pedagogical structure that leads to the creation of new and hybridized forms of art, writing, performance, scholarship, research, theory, design, curation, exhibition and publication appropriate for our evolving cultural moment. The program concentrates its curriculum on digital forms of creativity, thus enhancing the larger agenda of the university to cultivate cutting-edge investigations into the practice, theory, history and philosophy of media and into media’s relationships to creativity, communication, technology and information.
In short, the IAWP program offers itself as a hub of practice-based digital arts and humanities research that promotes interdisciplinary collaborations across departments, colleges and schools, and even outside the CU campus.
Course code for this program is IAWP.
Graduate Degree Program(s)
PhD in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance
Students in the IAWP PhD program learn how to develop creative and strategic practicebased research into the digital arts and humanities at the interface of intermedia art, writing and performance, and reflect on the ways contemporary art practice and scholarly research and production are being rethought in relation to the digital media, communication and information technologies that permeate international culture.
By focusing the pedagogical structure of the unit around a cluster of faculty directed research labs that foreground experimental, collaborative, processbased learning and technical development in the intermedia arts and digital humanities, students who graduate with a PhD in IAWP will bring into the world an advanced and creative skill set that includes the ability to create, produce, direct, design and theorize complex digital media projects that investigate both contemporary and future forms of interdisciplinary art making, performance, writing, publishing, exhibiting and curating. The flexibility of the collaborative learning environment that grows out of numerous disciplines, including studiobased arts practice, humanities research, creative writing and collaborative performance, will enable students to recalibrate the vital role creativity plays in the interdisciplinary research community. All of this will in turn serve as an incubator for future forms of personal expression and civic presence in digital culture.
Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the program, students in IAWP learn from and collaborate with faculty and graduate students located across various CU Boulder colleges, institutions, centers and departments, and thus will expose themselves to the best possible interdisciplinary learning environment. Given that the core and affiliated faculty members in the program are rostered in different colleges and departments across campus and are significantly involved with many arts and humanities departments, IAWP students will learn new ways to build strategic alliances with collaborators from many different disciplinary backgrounds.
Interested students should contact the department for current admission and degree requirements.
