Hi,
My name is Edward Tang. Of course, you most likely know that if you've stumbled across this blog. I am a PhD student at the Digital Arts and Experimental Media program here at the University of Washington.
I am also a practicing and producing digital artist myself. My interest in the field goes back to my days as a undergraduate at New York University where I studied Music Technology. I had been a "serious" musician and composer in my pre college days. However, I did not want to pursue the life of a music performance or composition major and wanted to blend in my interest in computers and technology.
My four years at the Music Technology program (which had more than its fair share of problems as an academic program, more details to come.....) landed me internships doing audio for video editing, which was my main job interest. I did music editing for All My Children at ABC (yes, the Susan Lucci soap opera). I was doing well there and was certain I would get a job offer once I had graduated.
I then had a life changing experience on a family trip to London. I had the pleasure of visiting the Millenium Dome in Greenwich, England. For those of you who have never heard of it - it was considered a massive failure - it was a year long celebration of the new millenium in a world exposition format under a specially constructed dome. We visited late summer 2000, when it was beginning to wind down.
It was basically a collection of themed exhibits all talking about aspects of our lives and how they might change in the new millenium. There were concepts such as "work," "body," "learning," "faith," and so on and so forth. The one that really caught my attention was "play."
"Play" was a collection of interactive digital art. It featured many acclaimed works from artists that all digital practitioners should know about. The ones that resonated with me the most were a collection of works by Toshio Iowai. One was a grand piano controlled by trackball that had a visual cascade of notes spilling out onto a long piece of fabric. The other was a table where one could manipulate the path of musical sparks that played back their notes when they touched the switchable nodes on the table. This got me thinking about these seemingly new ways of musical expression and how cool, quite frankly all of this stuff was.
(I'm going to be talking about "Play" more later, as it is a shining example of things done right in a digital art show.)
The job market fell out under me (as it did for many creative professionals in 2001), and I began to look at graduate schools. While looking at the film school at NYU/Tisch I stumbled upon the website for the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Intrigued I went to their 2000 Fall Show and talked with the staff there.
Honestly, I had no idea if this is what I was truly interested in, but I had no other direction to go at the time besides futile job hunting, so I went ahead and applied. I was just about one hundred percent sure I would get in with my high GPA, awards, and recommendations from undergrad and didn't sweat the application, which I handwrote, or my entrance essay, which was probably incomprehensible.
In retrospect, my attitude was pretty nonchalant. I even turned down a Graduate Assistant position without thinking much about it over the phone the summer before the program started up.
To be continued....