UCLA Design Media Arts

SINCERELY: DMA Senior Exhibition
06.08.23
TIME: 05:00pm
LOCATION: EDA, room 1250 and Untitled Gallery on the 2nd floor

Signing a letter “Sincerely,” has a special kind of power. Sincerely, allows communication to be authentic while still standing in respect. Sincerely, grants the receiving end an opportunity to interpret a letter as they want, but it is a word that signifies realness. It is not as formal as “With Love” and less withdrawn than “Best Regards”. Sincerely, can be warm and empathetic, or professional and modest—but it is always personal.

The UCLA DMA undergraduate class of 2023 welcomes you to our final sign-off, from us to you. This exhibition is a love letter to our guests and ourselves, reflecting on who we have become during our time at UCLA. Translated through a myriad of mediums, these creations voice what inspires us. As designers and artists, we will show the skills we have acquired and mastered during our time in DMA.

Like letters from us to the universe, our works declare the deepest parts of our identities as artists and feature a range of personalities and tones. Whether we are commenting on life’s nuance or identifying significant cultural imprints, these works highlight our authenticity and perspective. We invite you all to our exhibition.

Sincerely,
The DMA class of 2023

P.S. Sincerely, opens at 5 pm on Thursday, June 8th, 2023, lasting until June 18th.

The EDA and Untitled Gallery
Broad Art Center, Suite 1100,
Los Angeles, CA 90095.

Public parking is available in UCLA Parking Structure 3.

TOWN HALL: MFA FINAL EXHIBITION
DATE: 05.18.23
TIME: 05:00pm
LOCATION: The New Wight Gallery

To host a TOWN HALL is to initiate a public gathering. A gathering of thoughts, feelings, and uncertainties that each of us holds dear behind our screen presence. A space for remembrance and healing while we work through conflicting ideas, moving towards some kind of future. The 2023 UCLA DMA MFA cohort invites you to this town hall, where we could exchange our divergent voices about our collective personal struggles.
To begin this TOWN HALL, our cohort presents 12 media artworks built with material forms and immaterial pixels. These works extend our invitation to contemplate on digital selves and the lethargy they carry; to explore reality/unreality where places, spaces, and histories converge; to memorialize once colonized landscapes and minds; to cherish and archive corroding memories and entangled rituals; to communicate within and without extended realities; to hold reflections in a space, cry and feel lost; and to resist our perpetual instability amidst designed precarity.
TOWN HALL opens at 5 pm on Thursday, May 18th, 2023. Light refreshments served.
Participating Artists:
Hyun Cho, Eunice Choi, Michael Luo, Maya Man, Krista Ramirez-Villatoro, Bobby Joe Smith III, Henrik Soederstroem, Ariel Uzal, Wiley Wiggins, Camille Wong, Bomi Yook, Tengchao Zhou
New Wight Gallery
Broad Art Center, Suite 1100,
Los Angeles, CA 90095.
Daily Hours: Monday-Friday, 10am – 5pm through June 1.
Public parking is available in UCLA Parking Structure 3.

Jules Johnston | Schematics of Attention | DMA Graduate Solo Show
EDA, Broad Art Center, Room 1250
Opening Reception May 9, 5 - 8
Live Performance at 6
Schematics of Attention brings together a series of participatory experiments and performances that diagram the fractured and fervent experience of seeing today, as seen through your eyes, then mine, then yours once more. Please be prepared to split your attention, here, to the left, what’s that, can you do a 360, further, no further to the right– A live media performance will begin at 6 pm during the opening reception.

DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL FRIDAY MAY 19!!!
Limited spots still available for these courses. Final chance to Enroll!" register now at: https://summer.ucla.edu
• DESMA 21 Drawing & Color
• DESMA 25 Typography
• DESMA 160 Special Topics in Design Media Arts: Digital Photography
• DESMA 160 Special Topics in Design Media Arts: Professional Practice in Design and Media Arts

COMING IN MAY!!!

To host a TOWN HALL is to initiate a public gathering. A gathering of thoughts, feelings, and uncertainties that each of us holds dear behind our screen presence. A space for remembrance and healing while we work through conflicting ideas, moving towards some kind of future. The 2023 UCLA DMA MFA cohort invites you to this town hall, where we could exchange our divergent voices about our collective personal struggles.

To begin this TOWN HALL, our cohort presents 12 media artworks built with material forms and immaterial pixels. These works extend our invitation to contemplate on digital selves and the lethargy they carry; to explore reality/unreality where places, spaces, and histories converge; to memorialize once colonized landscapes and minds; to cherish and archive corroding memories and entangled rituals; to communicate within and without extended realities; to hold reflections in a space, cry and feel lost; and to resist our perpetual instability amidst designed precarity.

TOWN HALL opens at 5 pm on Thursday, May 18th, 2023, lasting until June 1st.

Participating Artists:
Hyun Cho, Eunice Choi, Michael Luo, Maya Man, Krista Ramirez-Villatoro, Bobby Joe Smith III, Henrik Soederstroem, Ariel Uzal, Wiley Wiggins, Camille Wong, Bomi Yook, Tengchao Zhou

New Wight Gallery
Broad Art Center, Suite 1100,
Los Angeles, CA 90095.

Public parking is available in UCLA Parking Structure 3.

Aurora Mititelu | Self/Defense | DMA Graduate Solo Show
EDA, Broad Art Center, Room 1250
May 2nd - May 4th, 2023
Opening Reception: May 2nd, 5-8pm

Self/Defense is an immersive media installation by Aurora Mititelu that proposes a poetic interpretation of human vulnerability and inner conflict through the use of digital representation and experimental film techniques. The work is a personal reflection on the internalization of narrative structures to make sense of one’s own psyche and autobiography. Through an iterative, obsessive loop, the piece creates a continuous tension between tranquility and conflict. It represents an aim to turn one’s skin inside-out, to transform a visceral feeling into a monumental, spatial, and aesthetic experience.

Broad Art Center — Experimental Digital Arts, Room 1250
240 Charles E Young Drive North
Los Angeles, CA 90095

Limited spots still available for these courses. Final chance to Enroll! Register now at: https://summer.ucla.edu

• DESMA 21 Drawing & Color
• DESMA 25 Typography
• DESMA 160 Special Topics in Design Media Arts: Digital Photography
• DESMA 160 Special Topics in Design Media Arts: Professional Practice in Design and Media Arts

"Limited spots still available for these courses. Final chance to Enroll!" register now at: https://summer.ucla.edu
• DESMA 21 Drawing & Color
• DESMA 25 Typography
• DESMA 160 Special Topics in Design Media Arts: Digital Photography
• DESMA 160 Special Topics in Design Media Arts: Professional Practice in Design and Media Arts

Chong Xu: Slow Down Up Load
DMA Grad Solo Show

April 25 - 27
Opening Reception: Tuesday, April 25 at 5pm
The Broad Art Center
Grad Gallery, EDA room 1250

Clovdrive is a web-based work created by Chong Xu that allows users to upload and download files. By harnessing real-time wind speed and direction data, your uploaded files will embark on a journey of their own, roaming the world and discovering new destinations along the way. To download your file, you only need to track its unique location within a 3-kilometer radius. This artwork delves into the distinctive nature of digital files beyond their technical properties. This also reflects on the capitalization of digital files and the inherent contradictions within the digital system.

WǎnTóng Yáo | ài . ai | DMA Graduate Solo Show
LOCATION: Grad Gallery, EDA, Room 1250
April 18th - April 20th, 2023
Opening Reception: April 18th, 5-8pm

ài . ai advocates for:
s*x as resistance
touch, tenderness, foreplay
obscenity as a new morality
transgression, transgender, transborder
erotic media as cultural forces and protest device
exhibitionism as a way to publicly display and publicly access
classification & regularization non-conformity
equitable training materials
absence of authorship as a form of protection rather than exploitation
ai against politicized content monitoring, state censorship, public surveillance
ai for love, desire, affection, identity, individuality, embodiment, gratification
ai for ài

ALL THERE IS
April 11th to April 13th, 2023

Opening Reception: April 11th, 5-8pm

Location: Broad Art Center, EDA
ALL THERE IS is new game/work by UCLA Design | Media Arts MFA student Vinny Roca.

Pick up a controller. Roam/fly around the computer-generated space. Embody any and all objects and stack them, one by one, atop the unit cube. Reach the goal height and enter a different space with different objects. Or, just drift - move from object to object, take a spin, take a ride, take a fall.

Peter Lunenfeld and DMA students in the inaugural issue of .able visual journal

Peter Lunenfeld has a visual essay based on the work of his DMA Design Futures students in the inaugural issue of “.able,” an innovative peer-reviewed visual journal that launches 3.23.23. Lunenfeld, who is all a member the journal’s editorial board, contributed a piece titled “Solve for (x)Futurisms” featuring DMA undergraduate work at the intersection of the visionary and the social. able-journal.org is a free, image-based multi-platform journal for publishing research at the intersection of art, design, and science. Based in Paris, and supported by the École Polytechnique, ENSAD (the national design school), and the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso, nd more than thirty international academic partners. The journal is published by Actar in Madrid.

Peter Lunenfeld webinar on academic publishing beyond text 3.24.23

Prof. Lunenfeld will be participating in a Zoom webinar on academic publishing beyond text as part of the launch of the inaugural issue of “.able,” an innovative peer-reviewed visual journal based in Paris. Friday, March 24th at 8:00 AM Los Angeles time. Using the case study of two image-based articles on .able journal, their authors and members of the .able network will discuss the potentialities and challenges of academic publishing going beyond the traditional text-centric model. Other participants: Ricardo Devesa, editor-in-chief, Actar Publishers (ES); Lucile Haute, Université de Nîmes/EnsadLab (FR); and Gisèle Trudel, Université du Québec (CA).

REACHING FOR ABSENCE
Brenton Sizwe Zola
DMA Solo Show
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
6pm

Hands tell the story of time. We use these hands of ours to live and love and understand the world. However, there is a long and dark tradition of the removal of these precious hands from African bodies.

Reaching for Absence is an exhibition by Brenton Sizwe Zola that takes the famous colonial symbol of Belgian lace and drapes it in beauty and tension on the Black body, with an emphasis on the hand. It reimagines historical scenes through themes of ritual, subverting expectations and looking to find an answer to the absence.

It asks us: where do we connect? When we are separated, we reach in absence, for absence.

The Broad Art Center
240 Charles E Young Drive North
EDA, Grad Gallery, Room 1250
Tuesday - Thursday, March 14-16, 2023
Opening Reception: Tuesday, March 14 at 5pm

HUA CHAI
You are a wandering trash collector sailing down a murky river in your humble boat. Iridescent waters glisten like oil coated plastic. Above its surface, floating clusters of discards and decay drift aimlessly along the current.

Navigate the wasteland. Pick up trash, look at it, hold on to it, consume it, offer it back to the world, or leave it be.

-

untitled Tr@sh Pr0j3cT is a series of works that collectively reflect upon the capacity for trash objects to both contain and construct histories, desires, and thus, worlds. All the trash used in this work is either collected personally by the artist themselves, or by their friends and acquaintances.

Through negotiations of what gets kept or discarded in the trash collection process, archival practice becomes a worldbuilding activity that is not necessarily motivated by utilitarian concerns, but could also potentially be shaped through nostalgia, global market forces, and notions of shared cultural identity. In this way, the trash archive itself bears the affordance to represent both a portrait of the archival practitioner, as well as a visualisation of the shared contexts and collective memories that they are informed by. The trash object is simultaneously the subject and medium for the act of historical (re)collection. In this arbitrary filtering of trash objects, along with instructional prompts that invite audiences to engage with the found trash objects, I hope the archive can reflect a more complex, contradictory and unpredictable environment as in Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough's notion of planetarity, in that even the so-called "creators" themselves are thought to be subjects rather than authoritative gods of the worlds they build.

Doyeon Kim
When We Become You and I Again: Solo Show

Feb 28 - Mar 2, 2023
Opening Reception | Feb 28, 5-8 pm
In Drift (2023), the life raft is the main actor, modeled after the word “we” and “우리”(Koean for “we”)They represent the vulnerable state and loss of inclusion through the migration. As the words contain intimate feelings, I wanted to integrate into the helpless form of the life raft, to emphasize the dysfunction of former society. With the word figured life raft, I explored questions about the sense of belonging that can arise to anyone who has migrated to somewhere else, far from their home.
I chose the word “we,” because it is simple yet powerful, carrying multiple layers of context. For me, “we” represents an ambivalent feeling—a mixture of solidarity and absurdity. It can be associated with communal experience, but it also divides us from others, creating boundaries and imposing dominant ideas. This contradictory nature resonates with my intention to question and reveal the societies and communities that both protect and constrain Us. I could realize how much I was relying on Korean society, after I had walked out from its shade. It was suffocating when I had to conform with the culture, but I realized it was also a system that sustained daily life when I recalled the former life from LA. From my journey, societies and communities were reflected as precarious than they looked like and their structure beneath the surface could be revealed when they collapsed.
My attempt carried in the work is to seek how we can share universal emotion about detachment and loss. There is a large number of the population here who crossed the ocean or borders as immigrants and I am one of them. I wanted to explore how I can integrate one’s personal history, which is about migration, into the spatial work that draws the beach as a virtual proxy for the stage. Moreover, I retrospect on the time when I embarked on the ship for two years, sailing across seas and watching people crossing the world for various reasons during my military service in the Navy. During the extraordinary experience on sea, the life raft was a symbolic thing as it is the last safety guard that we can rely on. It provoked the sense of anxiety and stress to us that we were constantly drifting on sea where any potential dangers were. Such a vulnerable state inspired me, again to position the life raft as an agency in the work that transfers the emotions evoked by the uncertainty of immigrant life.
Website: https://www.dynkim.com/
Instagram: dyn_kim_

UCLA DMA Graduate Gallery
Broad Art Center 1st Floor,
240 Charles E. Young Drive,
Los Angeles, CA 90095