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Works & Ideas Stories

Music DMA candidate Brian Baumbusch's Bali Alloy was composed in 2012 as a collaboration between the New York based string quartet, the JACK Quartet, and gamelan Makaradhwaja of Bali.

Set in Taiwan and Hawai'i, Film and Digital Media Ph.D. candidate Anita Chang's film Tongues of Heaven focuses on the questions, desires and challenges of young indigenous peoples to learn the languages of their forebears—languages that are endangered or facing extinction.

Rebecca Gourevitch, a masters student in the Social Documentation program in Film and Digital Media, spends time with Sylvia Smith, a San Francisco resident who has lived in her apartment for over thirty years. 

For Film and Digital Media senior Marisol Medina-Cadena, witnessing the bridge construction on the National Mall was not only a spectacular engineering feat but also a great visual metaphor—linking the historical legacies of this Inka tradition to a contemporary context in the shadow of the U.S... [more]

The death of Don David (Duncan)

Digital Arts New Media MFA candidate Mónica Andrade and Theater Arts Department MA graduate Stephen Richter reimagine classic tragedies to address current social issues through multimedia performances.

Mary Thomas, PhD candidate in History of Art and Visual Culture, describes the work of artist Noah Purifoy who, after the Watts uprising in 1965, collected parts of melted neon signs and turned them into sculptures.  

The Lords of Navarre have fun at the humble clown Costard's expense, in Shakes-to-Go's production of Love's Labour's Lost at Watsonville High, 2016.

Theater Arts M.A. student Kerri Blake Cavanaugh is the resident dramaturg of "Shakes-To-Go," an annual Theater Arts program that abridges one of the works of William Shakespeare and tours the production to the schools of Santa Cruz and its neighboring counties.

"At the undergraduate level, my current research is not influencing my teaching, except as a performer, because part of what I do is perform a lot.

David Harris, "Random Richters," from Edges of Color series, 8' x 8', 2016, detail. (Click to enlarge.)

Edges of Color, by Digital Arts and New Media MFA student David Harris, is a series of individually programmed pieces on an 8’ square, 16x16 grid of separately controlled and colored LEDs swatches.

Sarah Fay Krom, Image from [Verge], video game, 2016.

Visual language is a primary form of communication in storytelling media. As it transitions to serve the needs of game-based and interactive stories, expressive qualities are lost in translation in the move to a computational foundation.

Nang Sbek Thom, or large leather figures in Khmer, remains as ancient art form that emerged during the Angkor Period of 12th century Cambodia. The traditional performance for Sbek Thom is the Reamker, a buddhist adaptation of the Indian epic poem, the Ramayana.

Art Department alum Erick Medel writes, "I re-present physical manifestations of class structures at the intersection of photography and sculpture. My work deals in constructions of normativity, and their role in repression today.  

Rachel Smith is an alum of the UCSC Art Department.  About the first in the "How Many Syrians?" series, she writes, "This piece surrounds the death of Aylan Kurdi.  The day he died, his father lost two sons and his wife and vowed to return to bury his family and live by their graves.

Art Department alum and Irwin Scholar Jairo Banuelos creates sculptures and performances which investigate how race and class identities prevent people from accessing certain privileges  such as education, housing, and more.

"Encodings in Space and Time," by Digital Arts and New Media MFA alum Zach Corse, is an immersive, large-scale installation influenced by gravitational physics, information theory, ice mechanics, and city street lamp design.

Art Department alum Jocelyn Lozano uses photographic series and other artworks as a visual diary -- to navigate through areas of her psyche she can't explain in words, to express to others her internal world, and to create messages that will live forever not only as memories but as physical logs... [more]

Art Department alum Thomas Fallis is a San Diego native. He began drawing through the influence of his older brother, Ryan. In 2003, Thomas was introduced to Billy Martinez where he took lessons at Neko Press Studio for the next 6 years.

Sarang Kim is a composer, pianist, and percussionist, and currently a DMA candidate in the UCSC Music Department.

The Happy Valley Band is a deconstruction of the Great American Songbook through the use of state-of-the-art machine listening technologies.

"I'm really interested in taking something historical, which could be a film, documents, or an archive, and thinking about how to bring it into conversation in a present day space or with a present day public.

"I think that games tend to be thought of as 'reward machines,' ways of celebrating your victory, your ability. It's important to be able to build something that shows that it's about the looking, it's about the search.  It's not necessarily about winning."

"I like to think of my work as excavating value systems and thought processes of people of a gone era - their beliefs and their experiences, and how they use literary and visual material to communicate, to negotiate their place into the world, to develop their beliefs.

"My recent work expands on my previous theme of the body relationship to individual and private and personal objects. And now, extending into exploration - the movement of the body in space, and the time continuum that refers to migration, globablization, transportation, and mobility."

"I started with the issue of the way in which individuals have a sort of disconnect from the larger systems that we vote, and the way that we have these big systems...

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