UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA CONTINUES SUPPORT FOR ARTS RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

SANTA BARBARA, CA (July 7, 2009) – The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) has been awarded a major 5-year grant from the UC Office of the President, indicating that the arts are among the top research priorities for the University of California system.  Following the competitive review of new and existing research programs and initiatives across the 10-campus system, UCIRA was awarded $2 million over the next 5 years.

UCIRA was one of only 27 institutes chosen for funding from more than 135 proposals submitted for consideration across the state system in categories of Arts and Humanities, Social and Behavioral, International and Area Studies, Emerging Sciences and Technology, Biological and Health Sciences and Critical California Issues.

The UC Institute for Research in the Arts has been housed at UC Santa Barbara since 2005 and will continue to operate from its offices on that campus.  Current co-directors Kim Yasuda and Marko Peljhan are “extremely pleased that the UC system has made this commitment to arts research; in particular, those initiatives that have a broader social agenda, demonstrate public value and promote innovative interdisciplinary exchange with agencies and individuals from outside the University of California system.”

With more than 1000 artists and arts researchers currently employed across its ten campuses, the University of California is home to the largest group of nationally and internationally recognized artists in the world. UC is also a leader in interdisciplinary practices that link research in the arts with the sciences, technology, the environment, and the public sphere.

UCIRA will launch three new major initiatives in the coming 5-year period:

Social Ecologies: California-centric embedded arts research. With an eye to richly diverse landscape and challenged relationship between its natural and developed spaces, UCIRA will provide opportunities for artists to investigate the diverse terrains of the State. Embedding artists within various California institution and field contexts provides support for arts researchers interested in topics as diverse as agriculture, land and water use, emergent technologies and new forms of knowledge production and practice.

Social Technologies: new models of value exchange. Current economic conditions have precipitated a re-emergence of forms of artistic collectivism, exchange and ‘anticipatory’ practices, i.e. those that seek to imagine and address possible future economic and social modalities. UCIRA will establish opportunities for artists from across the UC system to enter into situated partnerships with artists, collectives and other agencies/institutions in order to explore new methods of value and idea exchange.
                                                                                                                                               
Integrative Methodologies: re-negotiating the art/science paradigm.  Artists generate unconventional and imaginative knowledge systems that emerge from aesthetic reflection and risk-taking processes. Their creative energies and skills can be used to catalyze, visualize and re-contextualize the work of scientists, encouraging alternative investigative methods and oblique approaches to problem solving. UCIRA will support art/science and artist/scientist collaborative configurations designed to facilitate new, hybrid, and fusion models of exchange, co-creation and research practice.