Incorporate movement, soundscapes, and storytelling into your work. Add moving images via live video, animation, stop motion, or digital techniques no one has thought of yet. Communicate your dreams across the breadth of the planet. The results? Amazing.

ACTLab@EGS is the bleeding-edge new program in Digital Arts and Transformative Media.  Following the lead of EGS, the world-famous European Graduate School, our mandate is to teach a very few highly motivated students how to create real change in the real world.

For those few selected students, we provide a unique three-week, immersive, hands-on educational experience at the hotly contested intersections of theory and practice in intermodal expressive art and transformative technology.

We are located at 6000 feet altitude near the foot of the Allalin Glacier on the EGS campus in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, home to not only one of the world’s most amazing universities but also some of the world’s finest hiking, skiing, and snowboarding.  We take our meals in the dining room of the four-star Hotel Allalin, mingling with distinguished faculty and visiting professors, filmmakers, DJs, artists, and theoreticians from around the world.  We maintain one of the world’s lowest student-to-faculty ratios, giving you unparalleled access to some of the great minds of the twenty-first century.  In addition, we’re close to some of the world’s best cultural opportunities, like the Venice Biennale and the Montreux Jazz Festival.  Students occasionally take a day or two to visit Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, or other hot spots.

Learn to think in multiple modes, then post your work on the ACTLab website. The world is your audience.

Our summer program is intensive and rich in opportunities.  Using state of the art equipment, you will learn to master digital arts and communication in a supportive, individually paced atmosphere. Dive into full immersion mode, interact with and learn from leading teachers and practitioners in the field, then come up for air in the breathtaking beauty of the Swiss Alps — hike, snowboard, or just enjoy the view.

It's not all work atop the glacier, but Danielle still has her camera ready. When you learn to live with eyes open, every experience is an opportunity.

You need no prior experience (except for bringing a laptop). In four specially designed courses, we take you from the simple basics of web navigation, through visual composition and sound design in video and film, to advanced theories of multiple interaction and digital immersion.  We help you develop your skills using intensive discussion, conceptual freeplay, and intellectual daring.

Working in our technology-rich environment, you will learn to master cutting edge hardware and software.  If you dare, you can proceed into discussions of the ethics and philosophy of such present-day practical technologies as cyberwarfare.  For instance, how does national internet censorship work, and how is it overcome?  How do we deploy communication technologies in large distributed communities to enable new emergent social forms?  How do we recast old sociopolitical conflicts in the age of instantaneous communication?  How do we use advanced technology to enable peaceful solutions?  In the twenty-first century, these aren’t theoretical questions: they are about life and death situations in today’s world of internet viruses, memes, targeted cyberattacks and lightning responses.

Master composition, lighting, editing, and videography with the help of award-winning professionals. Then learn to take the images you create into the digital dimension. The Web is everywhere, and the world is your audience.

While you learn and explore, we encourage unconventional approaches, flexibility, and transdisciplinarity, not only for their intrinsic worth, but because multiple knowledge sets are what you need to thrive in an era of exponential change.  As a freestanding program or combined with your work in Arts, Health and Society, the ACTLab@EGS program in Digital Arts and Media equips you to master Digital Media as a transformative tool for all facets of teaching, coaching, research, and technical and artistic practices in a wide variety of disciplines.

Intense discussion of the philosophy and cultural role of transformative media is a key part of the program.

Enrollment is extremely limited.  Some financial assistance is available.  Our application process is highly competitive, so to be sure of a place in the 2012 class, get your enrollment form into the queue as early as possible.