"Digital Arts as a discipline is emerging and incorporates many diverse areas of practice and scholarship," says Sharon Daniel, assistant professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. "It is an important area of study and research which should be firmly established in the academy and supported from an institutional perspective. On the other hand, I don't think it really has defined itself yet -- there are no fixed methods or practices and the discourse is open -- and to me that makes it much more interesting."

Adds Victoria Vesna, professor and chair of UCLA's new Department of Design | Media Arts: "Whether Digital Arts is another field entirely is not clear. Is it part of the arts world or a completely new field emerging? This is the debate that will take some resolution."

Daniel, Vesna, and their colleagues have been grappling with these questions for several years now. They have sought participation from faculty, deans, and administrators from across the sciences, humanities, and arts to begin studying how new technologies influence art and culture and to build an infrastructure for supporting the discipline as it grows.

Left: UC DARNet members and actress Karen Black prepare for the "Digital Secrets" performance. Right: Black's performance as a "secret agent" takes shape on the web. (Source: Carol Hobson, UCSD/CRCA)

In 1997, an ad-hoc planning group began investigating how UC could provide an opportunity for critical engagement and conceptual dialogue between humanists, scientists, and digital artists. This effort culminated in 1999 with the formation of the multi-campus research group called the UC Digital Arts Research Network ( UC DARNet ). The consortium includes faculty from six UC campuses and partnerships with other digital- and culture-focused research groups at UC, including the Digital Cultures Project, California Institutes for Science and Innovation, Cal-(IT)2, California NanoSystems Institute, and the Center for Research in Computing & the Arts (information about these groups can be found on the DARNet website at http://ucdarnet.org ).

DARNet attempts to collectively organize the creative power of faculty, students, and resources in the Digital Arts and to bridge people and programs across the various academic areas, with the goal of bringing about a critical mass of activity that will establish the University of California as one of the world's leading institutions for developing and studying the modalities of digital culture.

"DARNet is a group of dedicated faculty and students who are actively building their own programs and helping establish Digital Arts as a solid discipline," says Vesna.

In addition to providing a support system for the Digital Arts, members of DARNet are also actively collaborating with colleagues throughout UC and around the world in several groundbreaking projects that explore technology's impact on culture, communication, and art.

"Primarily, we're shifting from a model of individual authorship to a collaborative model," says UCSC's Daniel. "We're collaborating with each other and across disciplines."

DARNet's most recent collaboration was called "9/11-N2N: Networks to Nanosystems: Art, Science, and Technology in Times of Crisis." This series of "digitally mediated dialogues" took place on three UC campuses in November and included video streaming of presentations and discussions that questioned how the trauma of September 11 has shaped "what we do as artists, theorists, scientists, and humanities."

During its first year of operation, DARNet was involved in a cutting-edge conference with Arizona State University about digital art and emerging technologies called "Digital Secrets." The project involved the use of a virtual human interface, or "secret agent," played by actress Karen Black, who represented and reflected the consciousness and consensus of the UC DARNet collaborative team members, who were geographically distributed. Videos from the project can be viewed online .

In the future, DARNet plans to help the UC system set the agenda for research and collaboration with industry, as well as conduct research and development activities that facilitate distance learning and technology access to underprivileged middle school and high school students in Southern California.