Art driven Technology:
This is the art of the 21st century.

The Integrated Digital Art & Technology (IDArT) facility is a newly established Studio housed in the Department of Art & Design. Faculty from across the university have joined together to make this effort a reality. Such is the nature of modern art and communications communities.

The establishment of the IDArT studio advances EKU toward a larger research initiative that will be the basis for a fully-fledged research center in the digital arts and have the potential to create an interdisciplinary degree program. This will leverage our combined expertise in digital arts, audio, video, animation, and hypermedia. It will be a powerful force to attract research and development money in these areas. This studio will also provide a link for students to work directly with contemporary technology in collaboration with corporate and governmental agencies.

Powerful digital technologies have created opportunities for new paradigms of expression and representation: visual artists work in virtual worlds of alternative dimensions and relationships; composers explore new instruments and interactions in acoustic spaces of limitless bounds and construction; writers create stories and graphic novels without end, plots with multiple paths, and profound connections that leap across time and space.

The Department of Art & Design has successfully offered classes in collaboration with the Departments of English & Theatre and Computer Science in Digital Game Design and Graphic Novels. Each class offered was filled beyond capacity. This studio will help combine these initiatives to investigate the possibility of creating new venues of research and a new program that has linkages to allied areas.

Integrated Digital Arts may take many forms of presentation:

• A time based Graphic Novel enriched with images and sound, navigable through the World Wide Web or from a CD-ROM.

• A hypertext document, perhaps a reading/writing primer teaching and encouraging young people to write.

• An opera created by performers playing computer instruments which generate digital images with text created by computer-based algorithms.

• Virtual worlds of three-dimensional objects that respond to touch and context, delivered over the Internet.

• Digitally rendered animation and sound as a short film or DVD video.

The Department of Art and Design will strive for the highest possible standards of our diverse disciplines, while fostering critical thinking and creative problem solving in all our students, faculty and staff. Our goals range from enhancing life and imagination, moving information, creating distinctive functional spaces, provoking creative thought and telling the story of how we come into the now.

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