Art and Cultural Informatics is an area of informatics dealing with information as medium and content for art production, experience, and dissemination. The Informatics PhD, with an Art and Cultural Informatics Area, addresses these needs explicitly in its design: it makes technological knowledge (theoretical and practical) an intrinsic part of the curriculum, it draws on a wide base of disciplinary courses to establish interdisciplinary breadth, it emphasizes innovative interdisciplinary, collaborative research aimed specifically at meeting the challenges of creating art in collaborative, interdisciplinary, technologically enabled settings. Cultural Informatics is a broad term encompassing all areas in which the application of new information technologies will and might impact human culture: we see it playing an increasingly central role in culture production, experience, dissemination, and comprehension. It is inherently boundary breaking, fundamentally inter- multi- and trans-disciplinary. Informatics, broadly speaking, is impacting all branches of knowledge, all human exploration, experience, and understandings of the world. Cultural Informatics is that part of informatics that emphasizes understanding of the human world, that which is made or influenced by humanity: from history, social science, cultural studies, to written, visual, sonic, and kinetic communication, technology is transforming all aspects of human endeavor, all culture, all societies and communities. The Arts are an important part of Cultural Informatics. New technology and associated new modes of creative cultural expression and communication will radically transform the arts of the 21st Century. The impact of new technologies will be felt in four key areas: it will change the practice, the experience, and the dissemination of the arts, and through these it will change the role of the arts in culture and society.
