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Digital Media for the Artist is a course that exists within the field of Media Studies, which in turn exists within the Liberal Arts. The DMA course will focus on developing your skills as a Liberal Artist in ways that are highly relevant to your development as a Fine Artist. It will also function as an introduction to Media Studies with a particular emphasis on digital media.

A Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree such as the one offered at UNCSA is sometimes referred to as a terminal degree, but this doesn't mean it will kill you :) Instead terminal in this context means that the BFA degree certifies that you are fully-prepared to begin professional practice in an art field. The challenge of the BFA degree for students and instructors alike is that it in effect signifies that the recipient attains terminal-level mastery in both the Liberal Arts and the Fine Arts. In order to achieve this it is necessary to work hard, but more importantly it is necessary to work smart.


Working smart in this context means focusing on principles and methods --as James Webb Young mentions in the above quotation. If too much emphasis is placed on mastering what he calls the particular bits of knowledge or the rapidly aging facts associated with specific disciplines in the Liberal Arts, the possibility of attaining any meaningful form of mastery in both the Liberal Arts and Fine Arts in the process of getting a BFA degree is lost.

Detailed knowledge in the BFA degree attaches to the Fine Arts side of things, because all of you are majoring in Fine Arts disciplines. There is no time for everything in the Liberal Arts --unless everything is defined as knowing principles and methods, as Young does. So this really forces our hand: we have to focus on principles and methods, and to do this we have to focus on the commonalities between the Liberal and Fine Arts, if you are to emerge with the kind of solid education the BFA degree calls for.

In terms of commonalities, we first need to focus on skills-development. In this regard it is relatively easy to identify the expert-level skills of your Fine Arts instructors. In a fairly straightforward way, these folks really know how to dance, design, compose, choreograph, act, direct, build, play music, make films, and so forth. 

But it is much more difficult to identify the expert-level skills of your Liberal Arts instructors because they are often identified as people that have a lot of knowledge --a lot of rapidly aging facts about a particular subject-- rather than as people who are highly skilled at something. This is an unfortunate and misleading perception. Liberal Artists are highly-skilled experts in the conversational arts of thinking, talking, reading, and writing (in a variety of media including but not limited to text).  So our first piece of common ground is that both Liberal Artists and Fine Artists are highly-skilled experts.

Interestingly --and here is where we get our second piece of common ground-- mastering a set of Liberal Arts and Fine Arts skills (the requirement UNCSA sets for you) requires that you are able to work well creatively as well as intellectually. So, to be creative in your intellectual work and intelligent in your creative work is in some ways the whole-school goal.

In the Digital Media for the Artist course we will focus on developing your skills as a Liberal Artist in ways that are highly relevant to your development as a Fine Artist. We will practice these skills --the conversational skills of thinking, talking, reading, and writing (in a variety of media including but not limited to text)-- in the contexts of learning principles of Media Studies, and in the context of composition-studies involving hands-on projects.