Interactive Media Arts

Interactive Media Arts (IMA) encourages students to explore the expressive possibilities brought about by emerging forms of technology, media and communication. Our students are challenged to create interactive systems that connect people, facilitate participation, convey information, communicate stories, enhance experiences, and otherwise augment and improve society. This may involve the creation of digital media, the development of software, the production of electronic devices, the fabrication of material objects, the construction of physical and virtual spaces, or the fearless investigation of the recently possible. Our curriculum, community and active learning environment facilitate student acquisition of both conceptual insights and practical skills, and encourages our students to explore their personal interests in an attempt to find imaginative human-centered solutions to design challenges found in everyday life and the world around us.

IMA is the first undergraduate program organized in collaboration with the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), a top-ranked graduate program at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in New York. In designing the IMA curriculum, we kept ITP’s focus on the intersection of emerging media and humanistic values, but designed IMA to work within the undergraduate Liberal Arts curriculum present at NYU Shanghai. All IMA majors and minors take two foundation courses, Interaction Lab and Communications Lab. Interaction Lab introduces students to the fields of Interaction Design, Physical Computing and Digital Fabrication, and provides students with foundational skills in computer programming and electronics prototyping. Communications Lab introduces students to digital media, and asks them to produce a series of interactive multimedia projects for the Web using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Students then choose from a range of elective categories across the disciplines of art, design, science, computation, media and business with great freedom to make their selections. Majors finish with a Capstone Studio course by synthesizing methods of research and practice to produce an interactive project and related essay.