We help you to:
--
Develop your skills using ACTLab principles of intensive
discussion, conceptual freeplay, and intellectual daring. Working
in the ACTLab's technology-rich environment, you will 
master cutting edge hardware and software with an
eye toward new ways of representing your work. We encourage
unconventional approaches, flexibility, and multidisciplinarity,
not only for their intrinsic worth, but because multiple knowledge
sets are what you need to thrive in an era of exponential
change.
-- Learn by study and
example to translate your research into advanced media, emergent
technology, sound, movement, performance, and other dynamic modes
of representation.
-- Become
a member of the ACTLab's international community of award-winning
researchers, entrepreneurs, performers, artists, and scholars.
-- Share their advice and
experience via ACTLab mailing lists, workshops,and personal
encounters.
Your final work, besides being an
exploration and/or refinement of your semester's theoretical
studies, will be an original contribution to the development of
transdisciplinary approaches to research, redefining the scholarly
mission, and exploring new pedagogy for the twenty-first century
university.
We're aware and proud of our past
fourteen years of contributions to modern thinking, advanced
communication theory and practice, and academic excellence. We're
proud to say that we didn't jump on the New Media bandwagon -- we
created it.
The ACTLab is shaped and
distinguished by the extraordinarily diverse backgrounds and skill
sets of its faculty, students, and guests. From its inception, the
ACTLab has been a major international presence in defining the
nature and direction of new transdisciplinary
organizations. ACTLab principles of risk-taking, extreme
interdisciplinarity, and openness to innovation have been
extensively quoted and debated at institutions worldwide as they
attempt to chart their own future courses.
ACTLab courses are concept-driven, rather than skills-driven;
but we believe that theory flows from the act of making, 
rather than the other way around. The point of
each ACTLab course is to help you define, develop, and produce a
project that reflects on the social, cultural, aesthetic,
political, and personal issues raised in that particular
class. For undergraduates and for masters students doing projects
and reports, our aim is to teach you critical thinking about media
and technology and to help you develop a portfolio of
representative projects to take with you when you graduate. For
masters students doing theses and doctoral students, our goal is
to quicken your appreciation of technology's foibles and
potentials, but to ask research questions that interconnect with
these technologies and their social, economic, aesthetic,
political, and personal environments.
Our motto is MAKE STUFF! We offer you the
opportunity to engage cutting-edge technologies, but we also
encourage you to view these as tools rather than as ends in
themselves. Make sure you're taking advantage of technology,
rather than waking up to find that technology is taking advantage
of you. That's why we encourage critical thinking, and offer you
the opportunity to engage cutting-edge theory along with
making.
ACTLab courses have a broad
range and allow for multiple topics. You can taste a course or two
or work intensively over time, and even repeat courses because
course topics always change.