About iDMAa
The International Digital Media and Arts Association (iDMAa) was founded in early 2004 by a group of 15 universities. iDMAa is dedicated to serving educators, practitioners, scholars, and organizations with interests in digital media.
Around the world, universities and colleges are creating new programs and departments to teach and conduct research in Digital Media and Digital Arts. These programs are emerging from partnerships of Art, Computer Science, Communications-Radio/TV-Journalism, English, Music, Theater, Film and other disciplines. These programs often don’t fit within the neat and tidy confines of traditional university structures. Thus, their creators and champions often forge interdisciplinary partnerships to create opportunities, attract money, and stimulate explosions of creativity.
The International Digital Media and Arts Association was organized by and for people working in these margins. Margins are frontiers, but they are also uncertain places. Marginal people upset the establishment, take risks and make new things happen.
If you want to succeed on this new frontier, join the militantly marginal members of iDMAa.
Digital Media and Arts programs around the world address the production of content for existing media such as the Internet, radio and TV, digital cinema and video, computer games, cinematic special effects and animation, as well as for emerging media such as:
– mobile computing (GPS, personal digital assistants, smartphones)
– ubiquitous computing (“smart houses”, “information appliances”)
– interactive television
– online role playing games
– virtual reality
– distributed collaborations
Faculty and administrators everywhere are asking questions like these:
– What should we teach, once we get beyond web design?
– What is the intellectual core of Digital Media and Arts?
– How can we provide students with the best immediate job-related skills?
– How can we foster the development of life-long intellectual skills to enable our students to become leaders in new media content creation?
– What kinds of graduate programs are emerging in Digital Media and Arts?
– What are leading areas for innovation? What new media are emerging?
– How can our faculty stay current, produce publishable results, find fame and glory?
– What areas of new media are most attractive for industrial and governmental grants and contracts for faculty research and creative projects?
– What kinds of laboratories and other resources are needed?
– How can we convince our university to provide the resources we need?
– How can we involve external sponsors in supporting our academic program?
– How can we identify, recruit, nurture and retain the right faculty?
– How can we help in-place faculty develop new skills for the new discipline?
– How can we work in such an interdisciplinary area be evaluated fairly for promotion and tenure?