Contact:

Heath Hanlin, hahanlin@syr.edu
Department of Transmedia, 102 Shaffer Art Building, 315-443-1033

Faculty

Heath Hanlin, Annina Ruest

The Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) degree program in Computer Art and Animation is dedicated to exploring the possibilities of digital media within a fine art, exploratory, and culturally aware setting. Through instruction in 3D computer animation, electronic object creation, code-based art, sound design, and sonic art, students are mentored to become highly skilled critical thinkers producing art in individual and collaborative contexts.

In your first year, you build a strong foundation for working within the digital realm while developing an artistic voice engaged in the language of the medium. During the second year we investigate the diverse possibilities of computer art, the intensity of which is oriented by the inclination of the student and tailored through mentorship. In the third and fourth years, we bring these skills into creative focus, demanding a professional art practice that is both technically sophisticated and critically engaged.

Within the Department of Transmedia, computer art is integrated with film, art video, and art photography, allowing for a practice that is tightly focused but free to traverse a network of related disciplines. This network expands into the rest of Syracuse University, challenging you to further develop the intellectual resources needed to inform your work. Through this process you synthesize a perspective that is shaped within a web of mutual influence and discourse.

Celebrating its 30th year, the computer art program boasts alumni who are placed at some of the most prestigious animation and visual effects companies in the world-Pixar, Rhythm and Hues, Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasarts, Blizzard, Tippett Studios, Motion Picture Company, and Sony Pictures Imageworks-along with creative representation at galleries and media art festivals internationally. The program’s alumni and faculty have consistently pushed the edge publicly as to what it means to be a computer artist and continue to maintain that intensity today.