Art + Design + Collaboration + Literacy

Curatorial Engagement Across the Spectrum:

Advancing the Arts Research Center’s “Time Zones” series and working across multiple units, this domain explores the histories, experiments, vocabularies, values, and curatorial strategies of cross-art collaboration and social engagement across visual, theatrical, literary, musical, cinematic, design, architectural, and pedagogical forms and formats.

Creative Competencies:

On a campus whose Chancellor has declared the importance of Creativity in the undergraduate experience, this domain assesses the strengths and weakness of various definitions of “creativity” – investigating and framing our campus’s distinctive capacities to develop multi-modal research and learning environments that value diversity, public impact, and cross-disciplinary intelligences and practices.

Tradition and Innovation:

Expanding upon the “Old Things” series at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, this research domain explores how UC Berkeley’s research expertise in the deep history of arts and design practice contributes centrally to our capacity to innovate creatively and ethically in the present.

  • Visit: Phoebe Hearst Anthropology Museum
  • Visit: Lawrence Hall of Science

 

Cultural Criticism Across the Spectrum:

In a digital world where “everyone’s a critic,” the future of cultural criticism is reportedly more vibrant and more imperiled than ever. This domain develops strategies for ensuring a future where citizens produce and consume critical writing and reflection across all domains of art and culture, while deploying, testing, and redefining the online and offline circulation of ideas.

Media Futures:

The study and making of mediated forms occurs throughout our campus—in different schools, divisions, departments, centers, and student groups. What are the different kinds of media knowledge cultivated in these domains? How can they best be joined, distinguished, scaled, iterated, fortified, or redefined to ensure a robust 21st century future for the study and making of media forms at Berkeley?