Our students have created amazing online showcases of their work in previous years! Check them out here:
The Game Design and Art Collaboration Club have consistently produced amazing games! Get in touch and get involved!
Our faculty currently has active research grants on games and art, and several labs exclusively dedicated to researching digital art, games and social practice:
- The Other Lab: Founded and directed by Professor A.M. Darke, the Other Lab is a public-facing, intersectional feminist research space for experimental games, extended reality(XR), and new media. We support both undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and outside artists in creating work which charts new territory and amplifies the narratives of marginalized and underrepresented people. Though our faculty, residents, and collaborators come from multiple disciplines, we are each united in our commitment to social justice and human dignity.
- The Critical Realities Studio: Founded and directed by Dr. micha cárdenas, the Critical Realities Studio is a hybrid studio/lab for critical theory and art practice at the University of California, Santa Cruz, supported by the UCSC Arts Division. Our studio engages multiple realities in art, including augmented reality and alternate reality games, as well as other forms of art practice, to engage with the most pressing issues the world faces, including climate change, gendered violence, racism and colonialism, using algorithmic and intersectional methods.
- UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies is a group of artists and scholars dedicated to the investigation of monsters and how they are defined throughout history and culture. We recognize that monsters — and the media in which they prowl — reveal our deepest fears and greatest hopes. Our mission is to hunt cultural monsters in order to give us a better understanding of ourselves and to unlock the mechanisms of empathy and identity construction through the arts, social sciences, and humanities.