re:agency
What does human agency mean in the presence of systems that appear increasingly “agentic”—systems designed to absorb, predict, and appropriate human action? Where does agency reside when power is concentrated in the hands of a few, who unilaterally define what is possible and what will not be tolerated? And what might agency become if we choose, collectively, to reclaim and reassert our capacity to act, shape, and intervene?
re:agency marks a moment of reckoning. It is not only an invitation to reclaim our sense of authorship, but a demand to exercise it with renewed urgency and intention. Within MAT, we position ourselves not as subjects of technology, but as active collaborators in its evolution—re:imagining, re:purposing, and re:configuring the very systems that threaten our autonomy, and transforming them into tools for creativity.
Examine histories. Challenge the present. Envision what comes next.
Media Arts and Technology (MAT) at the University of California, Santa Barbara is a trans-disciplinary graduate program that fuses emergent media, computer science, engineering, electronic music, and digital art research, practice, production, and theory. The MAT department will showcase the cutting-edge research and new media artworks of our students, presented on June 4th at the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science, and Technology (SBCAST).