The Media Arts and Technology Program (MAT) is an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental graduate degree program that offers the Master of Sciences Master of Arts, and PhD degrees in Media Arts and Technology. MAT serves as a focal point for multimedia education, engineering, research, and artistic production.
The MAT Program is structured around a matrix of disciplines and research foci, where students and faculty from different disciplinary backgrounds work together in interdisciplinary research areas. Three disciplines represent the primary educational backgrounds and areas of application:
- Electronic music and sound design
- Visual and spatial arts
- Multimedia engineering
Students emerging from MAT have interdisciplinary breadth but also focus on an area of emphasis, according to their background and career interests.
Three research foci define the primary interdisciplinary research groups of MAT:
(1) Multimedia systems (storage, transmission, and programming of digital multimedia; distributed multimedia systems in support of sound and video; media signal compression and transmission; media networks; scalable middleware for multimedia)
(2) Multimedia content (synthesis, processing, representation, and analysis of multimedia information–scientific or aesthetic; advanced tools for generating, analyzing, and manipulating multimedia content)
(3) Interactivity (presentation and human interaction with multimedia information in the context of interactive applications; visualization and immersive environments; interactive sound performance; interactive art installations; vision-based interaction)
By integrating core disciplinary expertise with interdisciplinary research focus, MAT PhD students will pursue a transdisciplinary education, pursuing entirely new conceptions of media and art. Towards this goal, students participate in seminars, take courses in MAT and other departments, produce a thesis, project, or dissertation that represents significant and independent research
MATs distinguishing features are:
• arts and entertainment focus
• transdisciplinary approach based on a core set of skills and knowledge that all MAT students should master
• emphasis on group projects in multimedia software development and artistic production
Responding to strong student and industry demand, the MAT initiative is designed to:
• provide its students with concrete job skills that will allow them to work in artistic, technical, or producer/director capacities in the media industries of the 21st century
• foster aesthetically trained engineers-the media technology inventors of the future
• spawn electronic media artists who can work with a high degree of aesthetic and technical sophistication to enrich and enlarge our cultural heritage, and prepare thinkers for advanced studies in media arts and technology, leading toward academic careers in the pedagogy of this discipline.
Cross-disciplinary proficiency, interdisciplinary courses, and group projects are the glue of MAT. Faculty advisors assist students in planning their electives depending upon their area of emphasis and research focus.