Academics
Our program contributes to the University of Denver's mission to engage and empower students by promoting intellectual engagement, creativity and technical skills. Our program fosters a synergy of theory and practice by combining critical thinking and imagination. We balance scholarly investigation and innovative research with creative making, collaboration and community engagement.
Our goal is for students to experience, understand and contribute to the emergent forms and practices taking shape through technology in art, design and culture. In independent as well as collaborative projects, our undergraduate and graduate students demonstrate their ability to create, thrive and connect.
In the Emergent Digital Practices program, you will:
- Imagine, plan, create and critically examine digital and physical spaces for connection and conversation between people, technology and ideas.
- Understand and articulate the interactions among the digital arts, humanities and sciences.
- Synthesize your own research and work that explores the visual, sonic, interactive, tangible and participatory forms of art and technology.
- Develop, incorporate and foster sustainable practices in digital arts and digital design.
- Cultivate and implement strategies for personal reflection and expression, critical exchange and public discourse.
Undergraduate Degrees
The Emergent Digital Practices (EDP) major emphasizes the new forms of interaction, performance, collaboration and engagement developing as technology converges with knowledge and practices from across the arts, humanities and sciences.
Shaped by investment in participatory forms of creativity and critical engagement, EDP asks students to work together to develop strategies and processes for addressing complex interdisciplinary topics and problems beyond the realm of industry standards and proven application. We support new kinds of student and faculty interactions and collaborations by combining cutting-edge classrooms that are equal parts laboratory, studio, think-tank and stage.
For students looking to combine their EDP skills and knowledge with an additional major or topic of study, the BA degree or minor in EDP gives you the opportunity to learn to synthesize ideas and practices from across the spectrum of historical and contemporary digital culture and contexts. Our BFA takes a fine arts approach to digital practices in art and design, and generally won't be accompanied by a second major.
Dual-Degree 4+1 BA & MA
Our 4+1 BA & MA program brings together the interdisciplinary, critical and collaborative practices from our undergraduate and graduate degrees. You'll develop a deeper understanding of emergent digital practices and demonstrate your learning through a final thesis.
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Ready to Pursue a Major or Minor in EDP?
Featured Courses
EDPX 3120
Making Critical Games
About this Course
Students are challenged to create games (board, physical, video-, and hybrid games) that respond to social conditions in a critical manner while still maintain an essential ludic quality. Public good and civic engagement projects are welcomed. The course may be repeated with instructor permission when projects vary. Specific topics will very each time the course is offered, and the course is repeatable up to 3 times.
EDPX 3350
Sustainable Design
About this Course
This course surveys and functionally implements the foundations of sustainable design strategies as a praxis intersecting the domains of digital media design, dissemination, community organization and networking. The course builds upon the basic paradigms that have coalesced in the organizational and critical platforms of the sustainable design movement including ecology/environment, economy/employment, equity/equality and education/pedagogy/dissemination. The class reviews a wide spectrum of sustainable design strategies including: mapping of consumptive origin-thru-fate, green materials usage, creative commons, open source software/hardware movements, collaborative design, predictive complexity modeling, biomimicry, evolutionary design methods, and greening infrastructure among others.
EDPX 3800
Topics in Digital Making
About this Course
This course provides an in-depth exploration of the emergent digital practices of a technology or method for making (for example, wearables; interactive projections; augmented reality; immersive multi-channel soundscapes). Students learn the social/historical context of the particular method and consider the role and function their creations serve when it becomes public.
Graduate Degrees
As an EDP graduate student, you'll develop critical awareness and new media literacies alongside your own creative projects and research defining new modes of interdisciplinary work.
You’ll experiment with technology outside the realm of industry standards and articulate the critical underpinnings of your work. Advanced study in EDP will empower you as a scholar and professional in the new art, design and technology sphere that has developed alongside the powerful, networked and mobile computing technologies of the 21st century.
Our MA in Emergent Digital Practices combines the pursuit of advanced, investigatory technical media art skills with research agendas contextualized within a liberal arts and digital humanities framework. Our MFA emphasizes methods and production of creative research and works shaped by broader historical and cultural contexts. Students in both degrees learn to work together, share critical, theoretical and historical resources, excel in areas of creative expression and hands-on media art, and acquire specialized investigatory skills.
Continue Your Studies in Emergent Digital Practice
Featured Courses
EDPX 4340
Designing Social Good
About this Course
This course focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to artistic, scholarly and cultural methods for creating change in contemporary societal mindsets for a more sustainable and equitable future. Our objectives are to understand how current practices are reinforced and to then make experiences that encourage new ideas in the personal and global sphere.
EDPX 4270
Making Networked Art
About this Course
In this course, networked art is understood in the broadest sense from art that natively exists on digital networks to art that critiques and engages with the concept of the network in contemporary society. This course aims to develop a critical understanding of and response to the social, cultural, aesthetic and technical contexts of network culture, building on a deep understanding of contemporary and historical networked art practices. Students will engage with network architectures and platforms developing experimental approaches to user interface and interaction, deploying a range of digital materials from data to rich multimedia content to create work that produces new understandings of the role of the network in a post digital age.
EDPX 4010
Emergent Digital Tools
About this Course
This course serves as a primer on the tools essential to expression, sharing, and creation in digital mediums. This includes knowledge of web technologies, creative coding, video, audio, and the basic historical and theoretical contexts of each.
