Wireframe Studio was established to support collaborative and cutting-edge research and teaching in new media, with an emphasis on global human rights, social justice, and environmental concerns. From the outset, we have made UC Santa Barbara students a priority through innovative coursework, design opportunities, and stimulating public programming. Located adjacent to the emerging Digital Arts and Humanities Commons, the studio provides a space for production and critical engagement across media including games, data visualization, installation art, virtual/augmented reality, projection mapping, performance and installation, livestreaming, 3D modeling, mobile apps, and social media. In the future, we hope to expand our programs to provide the latest technologies for both our students in the classroom and interdisciplinary faculty/student research clusters. Through graduate and undergraduate courses; symposia, workshops, and other events; and team-based project development, we envision staging and sharing complex work in environmental and global media, and sparking dialogue among cultural producers, scholars, and activists around the legacies and continued importance of digital media practices. 

Co-Directors

Alenda Y. Chang is an Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. With a multidisciplinary background in biology, literature, and film, she specializes in merging ecocritical theory with the analysis of contemporary media. Her writing has been featured in Ant Spider Bee, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Qui Parle, the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, and Ecozon@, and her first book Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, December 2019), develops ecological frameworks for understanding and designing digital games.

Laila Shereen Sakr is engaged in an ongoing posthuman performance of VJ Um Amel. She writes, develops software, and produces multimodal art to theorize technology, language, and the body. Sakr is Assistant Professor of Media Theory & Practice at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Recently, she premiered a solo exhibition, Beit Um Amel, in Cairo at the Tahrir Cultural Center in 2020; and in 2021 she premiered another solo exhibition, Capital Glitch, at the Qualcomm Institute Gallery at UC San Diego. She was awarded the 2021 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Extension Award for developing Arab Data Bodies, a game driven by social media data. Her book, Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives, is forthcoming in 2023 from Stanford University Press.

Programs

• Wireframe Public Event Program
• Virtual Reality Research Cluster
• Games Library