Text by CLOT Magazine
SAIC is one of the oldest accredited independent schools of art and design in the USA. Founded as the Chicago Academy of Design in 1866, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) provides a challenging education in the studio arts and exhibition opportunities for its students. SAIC is committed to embracing new technologies to both expand the possibilities of existing artistic processes and to engage with them critically.
And in doing so, alums have played central roles in important art movements such as the Regionalists of the 1930s and the Imagists of the 1960s. SAIC provides undergraduate, post-baccalaureate, and graduate degrees and offers a broad and dynamic spectrum of study, including Art and Technology Studies (ATS).
Art & Technology Studies (ATS) is a fine art department focused on using technology as a medium. The department’s roots are the Kinetics area established in 1969 by Steve Waldeck and the Generative Systems area created in 1970 by Sonia Sheridan. Their students create and manipulate objects, spaces, images, sound, text, light, music, voice, scents, organisms and movement with custom-written software, newly fabricated materials, unconventional processes and new methods of integrating technologies. This DIY and hacking philosophy is embodied throughout the curriculum, and works produced are often interactive, immersive, multisensory or hybrids of retro and cutting-edge technologies.
Art & Technology Studies (ATS) faculty are artists with national and international reputations with backgrounds in multiple disciplines, including computer science, engineering, machining, sound, light, musical composition, poetry, biology, performance, philosophy and contemporary theory. New technologies are not simply viewed as flashy tools for making art but as freshly minted cultural material.
ATS teaches numerous courses in, but not limited to, the following concentrations: Creative Code & Machine Learning, AR, VR & Games, Kinetics & Electronics, Light, Audio, Bio Art, and also teaches exploratory areas such as Poetic Systems, Olfactory Art, and History & Theory.
Application Deadline: January 10, 2022. SAIC offers a priority application deadline for all graduate programs. The priority deadline provides a reduced application fee of $45 for students who submit their applications by December 1.
