Simon Penny is the founding director of the Arts, Computtion, and Engineering program at the University of California, Irvine. ACE is a new transdisciplinary Graduate Program in Arts, Computation and Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, supported by the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences.
ACE addresses emerging practices and career paths that combine skills and sensibilities of technical and scientific disciplines with arts and humanities. ACE exists at the intersection of Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Computer Sciences, Engineering and other disciplines. ACE is rigorously interdisciplinary. The ACE program is oriented towards informed production. ACE students make things that work, and they understand the technical, historical and socio-cultural locations of their work. ACE favors originators of novel techno-cultural formations, makers of machines, responsive environments, socio-politically situated action and non-standard technological systems.
Theoretical and historical perspectives from the Arts, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and a variety of other sources are combined to provide students an intellectual and practical foundation that combines analytic and practical perspectives germane to their practice.
The sensibilities of sculpture, installation and performance art, graphics, improvisatory dance, drama and music are central in the production of new cultural forms. Real time computation, robotics and motion control, microcontroller and sensor technologies, immersive media technologies, computer graphics, networking/telematics, gaming, embedded and wireless technologies are key technical areas.
The ACE program moves beyond works whose final form is non-interactive linear image streams (such as traditional film, video) and sedentary desktop interaction (such as conventional web design.) Instead, the central focus of our program is computational techniques involving embodied, emergent and generative real-time performance, including immersive installations, artificial life, autonomous agents, and social simulation.
Click this link to visit the ACE website.
