Intermedia Program

The MFA in Intermedia is a creative studio-centered degree that extends a key aspect of the University of Maine’s New Media Department, that is its hybridity, as a core of its focus in creative and studio work. Although the MFA will focus on the intersection of new technologies and contemporary art, it is not a traditional art degree. We have chosen the term Intermedia to reflect our aim and intent - that is to work with, and study creative processes which fall conceptually and physically between known/used media, as well as between traditional disciplines such as photography and computer science, biology and sculpture, or music and sociology. The three key factors of Intermedia for the program and the faculty involved are:

1. Traditional media distinctions are only reference points not limits for current practice.

2. A key component in current studio practices are intellectual/critical tools, (what we call praxis in our program).

3. A necessity of new forms that result from a dialectic between media. 

The MFA in Intermedia is an interdisciplinary program committed to creative research, experimental investigations, and technological engagement as well as development and production in hybrid forms of art such as time-based media, digital and video art, installation, performance art, artists’ books and multiples, community-based social art practices, conceptual art, net art, generative art forms (algorithmic art forms), and other new forms that the students may generate from their own Intermedial explorations. These new forms are however, not without grounding in, or connections to, traditional art forms in music, writing, performance studies, media studies, and the visual arts.