As Design | Media Arts students, we have been tasked with navigating the social, economic, and environmental climate around us by creating art and design using the new media and technology that has been inhabiting more and more of our artistic environments.We’ve had time to contemplate and reflect on the ever-growing and complex changes that have affected us as creatives. Now we come here with our ideas, as artists and designers, counter-mapping the bridges between the plugged and unplugged world around us. This exhibition serves as a celebration: a time to try new things together, revisit our pasts, think about who we are and who we want to be. Now, after two years, we are able to come together for the first time, to hold space, to collaborate, and to view work all together, in person.

We invite you to join us, as we explore what it means to be at the forefront of such emerging forms. The theme of this year’s show plays into the complex feelings of exploring the cross section of the two fields we inhabit with this major: art and technology. While everything that falls under the Design | Media Arts umbrella ranges from tactile forms to experimental investigations using motion and artificial intelligence, it will always engage in this intersection of both art and technology.

Our title, “Hey, Can You Pick Me Up? I'm Scared, I’m at the Intersection of Art and Technology” plays into all of the nuanced feelings that come with being an artist and a student within this department: playful, dissociative, experimental, etc. This January, we will come together, reunite, and celebrate what it means to be at a cross section in the art world in an exhibition presented at the New Wight Gallery and virtually.

See the exhibition online at https://projects.dma.ucla.edu/exhibitions/Undergrad2023/