Emergent Digital Practices

Office: Sturm Hall, Room 216
Mail Code: 2000 E. Asbury Ave. Denver, CO 80208
Phone: 303-871-7716
Email: edp@du.edu
Web Site: https://liberalarts.du.edu/emergent-digital-practices 

Emergent Digital Practices (EDP) provides undergraduate students with a broad understanding of the history, theory and emerging status of multiple cultural practices, both mainstream and alternative, which are evolving alongside digital technologies. The EDP major emphasizes the new forms of interaction, collaboration, engagement, and performance developing as technology converges with bodies of knowledge and practices from across the arts, humanities, and sciences. Shaped by an investment in participatory forms of creativity and critical engagement, EDP asks students to work together to develop strategies and processes for addressing complex interdisciplinary topics and problems beyond the realm of industry standards and proven application. Together, EDP faculty and students will strive to create new forms of art, experiences, media, and ways of knowing in the 21st century.

The Emergent Digital Practices program brings together art, design, media, culture, and technology studies in a hands-on, collaborative environment. Technology links academic disciplines with professional fields and joins shared communities with our personal lives in many new and exciting ways. To understand and explore this landscape, we infuse the digital practices of making and writing with contemporary critical approaches to cultural technologies, media philosophy, the critique and investigation of electronic and new media arts, and studies in science fiction, trans-global politics and science.

Emergent Digital Practices appeals to students who are more broadly defined creative types and critical thinkers because the lines between artists, designers, scholars, and inventors have largely dissolved. The EDP program prepares students who seek to work in spaces beyond what is already defined and familiar. To help students acquire a broad spectrum of media literacies and practical artistic skills, the EDP major combines cutting-edge classrooms with new learning spaces that are equal parts laboratory, studio, think-tank, and stage. Integrating powerful desktop computer stations and highly mobile technologies within a variety of interactive smart-spaces, the EDP program supports new kinds of student-to-peer and student-to-faculty interactions and collaborations.