Convergent Media is a program concentration within the Department of Radio-Television-Film. It is designed to question the impact of technology on our visual, spatial, corporeal and textual environments. The Convergent Media program is not limited by academic or architectural boundaries‹it stretches across disciplines and communities and is defined more by its potential for extension outwards than by its local position. The term "convergent" applies to technologies and their evolution / consolidation but also to more traditional media and the effect technologies have on their continually evolving relationship to each other. The area is called "Convergent Media" because all media are historically situated. They are simultaneously instruments for and reflections of cultural production. Convergent Media takes into account the effect of one medium on another and acknowledges the continued interplay of analog and digital systems.

Students working in Convergent Media have the opportunity to engage cutting-edge hardware and software, but they are encouraged to view these as tools rather than as ends in themselves. More importantly, they are asked to imagine the day when they will be interacting with computerized walls and organisms, when microchips in their bodies will be sending signals and commands to machines of their own creation, when place and location are divorced, when the act of reading exists outside our current linguistic structures. Convergent Media equips students with the skills to imagine and design the future. Thus students working in the area must be able to situate their work in histories of art, architecture and design; science and medicine; text and language; music and sound; performance and communication; networks and distribution.

The home of the Convergent Media program is the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (the ACTLab) a freewheeling research facility for advanced work at the boundaries where technology, art, and culture collide. This lab is located in CMB Studio 4B.

Curious visitors are always welcome!