What is Media Arts?

What is media arts? In this ever-changing and dynamic discipline, primary categories in media arts now include

• Moving Image – Cinema/Video/Animation – narrative, non-narrative, environmental, experimental

• Imaging Design – digital process-based imagery, code enhanced (e.g. the image has code embedded in it for interactive and adaptive purposes)

• Sound Design – digital process-based aural synthesis and engineering

• Interactive Design – web, game, sensory-tech, creative code

• Multimedia and Intermedia – additive and hybridizing mixtures

• Virtual Design – 3D, 4D, 5D (spatial, animated, non-linear, interactive) environments, structures and experiences

Media arts is perhaps best understood by viewing the artworks themselves. Writing chair Dain Olsen of LAUSD, provided our writing team with a sampling of student in 2011, which you will find at the bottom of this page.

Media Arts Coursework

In 2017, working with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a team from the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards Media Arts Committee was able to provide a series of Media Arts course codes which can be used by state and local departments of education as a sorting system for collecting data on course instruction. These course codes were adopted by NCES and may be found on their website at https://nces.ed.gov/forum/SCED.asp .

Members of the Media Arts Committee, Dr. Pam Paulson, Richard Burrows, Marcia McCaffrey and Cory Wilkerson, authored a sample sequence of instruction in Media Arts.

Download the sample sequence of instruction.

You may also wish to follow this link for a rationale for a media arts education initiative in LAUSD, which includes a wide variety of additional work samples.

Some Examples of Student Work

For more current student work samples, please view the media arts student work on the national core arts standards website at www.nationalcoreartsstandards.org .