• EXIT STRATEGIES features new artwork from the graduating MFA class of the UCLA Design | Media Arts department. Works span the genres of installation, painting, performance, sculpture, software, sound, and video.

  • Mission Statement

  • Ours is the era of the exit strategy. Whether in military, commercial, or personal engagements, exit strategies inject planned obsolescence into every human action. Exit strategies collapse history into instrumentality: the ends justify not only the means but also the beginnings. They sacrifice openness, complexity, and sustainability to the gods of the closed, the simplistic, and the disposable. They are meager attempts to convince ourselves of the possibility for absolute control and computability in all areas of life.

    We see the current cultural obsession with exit strategies as an opportunity. Our work destabilizes the concept of the exit strategy by recasting it as an ethics of escape, subversion, and nomadism. Our exit strategies are material mechanisms for prying open hermetic systems of power and representation. Our practices discover ways out. Our works plot paths for others to follow.

  • Opening Night: May 15 at 5pm

    Exhibition: May 15-29

  • About UCLA Design | Media Art

  • The Department of Design | Media Arts is located within the School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. We are committed to educating responsible designers and artists for the information age by teaching the fundamentals of Design, Media, and the Arts, and encouraging experimentation and innovation. We provide an extensive education in Design and Media Arts practice, history and criticism, and the department fosters a critical and creative exploration of emerging forms of visual communication, typography, interaction and interface design, ubiquitous computing, virtual environments, information spaces, networked agents and other pertinent areas of research.


    Website: UCLA Design | Media Arts

  • More Information

  • Address

  • UCLA Design | Media Arts
    Broad Art Center
    240 Charles E. Young Dr.
    Los Angeles, CA 90095-1456

  • Parking

  • Parking is available in Lot 3, across the street from the Broad Art Center. For more information, call 310-825-3951.

    Daily parking passes are $8.

    You can purchase parking passes at the Parking and Information Booth located at the corner Charles E. Young Drive and Wyton Avenue.

  • Contact Us

    • General Inqueries
    310.825.9007

    Event Information
    310 825 1969

  • Profiles

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  •  

  • Casey Alt

  • Estevan Carlos Benson

  • Zach Blas

  • Xárene Eskandar

  • Yunsil Heo

  • Jihyun Kim

  • GIl K

  • Christopher O'Leary

  • Aaron Siegel

  • Jacob Tonski

  • Pinar Yoldas

  • Credits & Thank Yous

  • Casey Alt

  • VacilLogixâ„¢ Brand Launch
    • Images
    • Project Website
    • http://vacillogix.com
  • As the first entrepreneurial venture to fully embrace the limitless productive power of sociopathic behavior, VacilLogixâ„¢ is committed to providing high-performance products for democratizing sociopathic strategies. Its primary point of client contact is its Slightly Sociopathic Softwareâ„¢ line: a suite of four social networking applications for enhancing and automating every client’s natural sociopathic talents. Other VacilLogixâ„¢ products include personal brand workshops, sociopathic survival apparel, community networking events, and motivational brand manuals. On May 15, VacilLogixâ„¢ will unveil its innovative brand vision as well as its inaugural set of Slightly Sociopathic Softwareâ„¢ applications.

  • Artist Profile

  • Casey Alt is an artist and theorist whose work explores how interface mediates power and culture. His artwork often spans multiple mediums, including software, design, installation, and performance and frequently bridges the realms of critical theory and artistic practice. Primarily engaging in problematics and processes of computational media, his works provoke broader cultural and historical questions of individual agency and difference, information and embodiment, and power and knowledge. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is completing the final year of his MFA in the DesignIMediaArts Department at UCLA.

  • Website

  • http://www.caseyalt.com

  • Next

  • Estevan Carlos Benson

  • This small part will suffice
    • Images
    • Project Website
    • http://www.estevancarlos.com
  • A narrative is constructed through process, experience, photography, performance, and objects. As a result, the object becomes something new. The poet Charles Simic said, "all art is a magic operation, or, if you prefer, a prayer for a new image."

  • Artist Profile

  • Estevan approaches his process as a ritualistic one. It's an investigation of metaphor and myth relating our cultural exchanges of words, objects, and subjects. Artists are entrenched in both worship and ritual. Estevan aims to relate his work to "primitive" concepts and aesthetics while simultaneously mis/handling the loaded term, "primitive" itself.

  • Website

  • http://www.estevancarlos.com

  • Next

  • Zach Blas

  • Queer Technologies
    • Images
    • Project Website
    • http://www.queertechnologies.info
  • Queer Technologies is an organization that functions at the intersections of art, the political, and consumerism, producing tools for queer agency, interventions, and community building. this work attempts to understand and explore--in the queer style of "strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices"--the effects of queer life on technology and technology on the queer way of life. employing josé esteban muñoz’s concept of "disidentification," Queer Technologies struggles to create, mutate, and establish flows of resistance within larger spheres of capitalist structurations, "identifying" and "disidentiying" with these spheres in tandem.
    projects include transCoder, a queer programming anti-language; ENgenderingGenderChangers, a "solution" to cable gender adapters’ male/female binary; Gay Bombs, a technical manual manifesto that outlines a "how to" of queer political action through terrorist assemblages of networked activism; and the Disingenuous Bar, a play / attack on apple computer’s genius bar for tech support that offers a heterotopic space for political support for "technical" problems.

  • Artist Profile

  • Zach Blas is an artist and theorist examining the impact of technological ideology and control on the body, gender, and knowledge and how this reshapes representation as well as reconfigures modes of agency and resistance. he has exhibited and lectured in cities from los angeles to berlin, including new york, mexico city, london, and paris.

    Zach is a MFA candidate in the media arts department at the university of california los angeles. he holds a post-baccalaureate certificate from the school of the art institute of chicago in the art and technology studies department and a bachelor of science from boston university in film and philosophy.

  • Website

  • http://www.zachblas.info

  • Next

  • Xárene Eskandar

  • Other Earth
    • Images

  • Rooted in contemporary philosophies discussing issues of disembodiment, immateriality, deterritorialization, and nomadism, my work is a reaction to my surroundings: our commoditized society, the sprawl of characterless urbanism and its disjunction with nature, and alienation from our ancestors’ knowledge of life and living beings. My focus is to eradicate the lasting impact of our mortality on our natural environment and to promote the use of our technologies to forge a new model for existence in accordance with nature.

    The new model, which I call Other Earth, is based on my concept of tentative architecture, which is an immaterial architecture that can happen at any point in space and an architecture that is immediately related to the bodies occupying it and does not exist without the presence of one. Other Earth is a plan of urban structure as a rhizome. The nodes of this rhizome are intelligent drifters living a technologically advanced, self-sufficient, and no-impact lifestyle; nomads who at any moment can break away and exist on their own, wearing their architecture on their bodies and allowing their environment to be defined by non-material means.

    The media-architectural concepts of Other Earth are in support of emergent architectures where form arises from natural pattern and nomadic systems where organism and form are all encompassing, becoming one, and adapting to multiple states. What I hope this peek into Other Earth will bring, is a scenario plan for a future detached from what we have come to be attached to: unnecessary stuff.

  • Artist Profile

  • Xárene has a diverse background ranging from automotive design to architecture and event production. She takes on anything the situation needs her to: a builder in a range of mediums; a designer without boundaries; and a catalyst funneling anger and despair into creativity.

    Fusing concepts of the rhizome, Singularity, and the phenomenology of space, Xárene's current work visits the parallel universe of Other Earth, a nomadic society where the inhabitants’ responsive wearables create tentative architectures within an invisible urban infrastructure. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Design from University of Cincinnati, Department of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, and her MFA from Design|Media Arts, UCLA.

  • Website

  • http://spacecollective.org/Xarene

  • Next

  • Yunsil Heo

  • OASIS
    • Images
  • OASIS, an interactive installation, is a metaphor of a sudden discovery of oasis by exhausted travelers. A surface covered with black sand will turn into an oasis when people grab and remove a handful of sand. In this micro-oasis, virtual creatures will be born and prosper. People can manipulate the species and population by shaping the pond or moving pebbles. The virtual creatures recognize their spatial boundary of living and respond to people’s touch in various ways. From a god-like perspective, people can enjoy touching the tactile materials of this installation and watch it become full of lives.

  • Artist Profile

  • Yunsil Heo (http://www.yunsil.com) is a human interface designer who explores interactive environment offering pleasant physical experiences. Her major concern is deigning daily spaces innovative and enjoyable with interactive media.

  • Website

  • http://www.yunsil.com

  • Next

  • Jihyun Kim

  • A Landscape of Events
    • Images

  • A Landscape of Events is a series of attempts to simultaneously objectify nature, subjectivize a landscape, and visualize the liminal scene of natural phenomena. The work employs near real time geographic data from natural events that resist visual recognition and cannot be experienced in everyday spaces. The project examines our experiences of spatial and perceptual conditions through objects and installations. The physical form of the work consists of materials from our surroundings / the built environment, such as concrete, metal, and machinery.

    In the first project of this series, wind data from NOAA's buoy center (http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/) is deployed in an attempt to visualize, more precisely, the creation of phenomena and inscribing of space from the liminal and invisible scape of natural phenomena. The traces, the corrosion, on each aluminum sheet represent each station’s wind speeds and directions during the day of May 15, 2008. Salt water, electricity, and stainless steel were used to corrode the aluminum sheets.

  • Artist Profile

  • Born in Seoul, Jihyun Kim explores mediated in-between spaces and events in everyday life.

  • Website

  • Next

  • GIl K

  • Pogophonic
    • Images
  • Pogo-phonic is the rethinking of the pogo stick as an instrument in sound composition. The pogo stick triggers sound samples such that the pogo-ers also become the complicit composers of an improvised audio composition. (Pogo Sticks courtesy of Vurtego Inc. www.vurtego.com)

  • Artist Profile

  • Through careful social conditioning, the mind is guided to think within certain patterns. Gil Kuno tries to redirect the flow of the mind outside of the set patterns we are taught by society to construct. Most of his works displace natural activity from its context, revealing an otherwise hidden level of metaphorical absurdity within the ordinary patterns present before our eyes. Much of his work revolves around the experience of sound.

  • Website

  • http://www.unsound.com

  • Next

  • Christopher O'Leary

  • Giant-Sized Issues #3
    • Images
    • Project Website
    • http://www.chrisoleary.net
  • Christopher O’Leary is an artist who works in video, photography, sound and installation. His work establishes a relationship between performance, space and the camera itself, through which new or imagined realities are synthesized. By capturing and manipulating brief segments of simple performative actions within urban space, he creates images which function as self-contained experiences which evoke transformation, struggle and escape. Interactive installations spatialize these pieces, connecting the work, the audience and the site through sound and motion.

  • Artist Profile

  • His current research involves the notion of superpower in American culture. Appearing across cultural forms from comics, film and television, superpowers are emblematic of a broad desire for escape from power and constraint. Through the process of technological manipulation the work extends the artist’s body in space, time, matter and energy.

  • Website

  • http://www.chrisoleary.net

  • Next

  • Aaron Siegel

  • Power Structures
    • Images
    • Project Website
    • http://www.powerstructures.net
  • Power Structures allows for the communal management of data and visual mapping of networks of influence. Participants are invited to contribute data online about people, places, things, events, groups, and the relationships that tie them together. The maps that are produced act as narratives in the hope of revealing new information or clarifying already known information about the power structures that influence our lives.

  • Artist Profile

  • Aaron Siegel is a transdisciplinarian with a concentration in computational information design. He received his BFA in digital media art from the Cadre Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University in 2006. His motivation comes from interesting data sets, interfaces, and social justice applications. His work utilizes data visualization to address complex systems of power structures and networks of influence. He aims to achieve an overlapping relationship with aesthetic representations of data and scientific empiricism. His work strives to display relationships and correlations within information systems that would remain unseen from any other perspective. The goal of many of his creative endeavors is to enable people with a greater understanding of a system larger than themselves; a technical capability usually reserved for large corporate and government institutions. By enabling the average citizen with data management, analysis, and visualization technology, an inverse panopticon can be created where the collective participation of a community can monitor and hold a larger institution accountable for its actions.

  • Website

  • http://www.datadreamer.com

  • Next

  • Jacob Tonski

  • Big Top:: Balance Study :: I'm Taller
    Than Most of the People I Know
    • Images
    • Project Website
    • http://dma.ucla.edu/~jetonski/exit-strategies/
  • Jacob Tonski’s work explores dynamic balance. A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay. These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.

  • Artist Profile

  • Tonski studied computer science at Brown University, has worked as a Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios and developed toys at Leapfrog. He has lived in Berkeley, Barcelona, Paris and Providence and grew up in West Virginia. His work combines software, electronics, carpentry, metalwork and people.

  • Website

  • http://www.jacobtonski.com

  • Next

  • Pinar Yoldas

  • FABULA
    • Images
    • Project Website
    • http://www.pinaryoldas.info/fabulaWeb

  • SUPERMAMMAL is a 40"x60" print on glossy photo paper mounted on 3/4" gather foam ,this is one of the first sketches for a complete species which I elaborated on

    UROGENITAL FOLDS is a wall sculpture that consists of 17 glass petri dishes (dia btw 4"-10") treated with polymer clay and resin.

    MICRO-GARDEN OF EDEN is a semi-generative animation,although I started in processing I converted to flash. Special thanks to Chandler McWilliams!!!

    NEUROTRANSMITTERS AND THE FUTURE OF COMMUNICATION is basically a kinetic sculpture. It cages 6 specimens in the most elegant way.6 glass containers,air pumps, various tubings & fittings, a servo motor,latex, polymer clay, LED lights, chemicals. Special thanks to Paul Yarin!!!

  • Artist Profile

  • Pinar started holding a pencil when she was 10 months old and had her first painting exhibition when she was 5. She attended a special high school focusing only on science, where she specialized on organic chemistry. She then collected degrees in architecture(major) , sociology(minor), visual communication design(MA) and information technologies(MS).
    Her work is a reflection of her interests in neuroscience, evolution, gender studies and science fiction . In her work she explores new materials and new production tools in order to blend conventional media with digital media . She believes in the power of art to transform human mind, that's why she thinks it is artists that will save the planet .

  • Website

  • http://www.pinaryoldas.info/

  • Credits

  • Design by

  • Wayne Fan

    Yoko Sakao Ohama

  • Brand identity, mail announcements,
    poster, website, exhibition.

  • Thank You

  • DMA Faculty & Staff
    Typecraft Wood & Jones