MAT end of year show fuses art and engineering

UC Santa Barbara’s Media Arts and Technology (MAT) program will present its annual end of year show, “Deep Cuts,” with public events on June 3 and June 5. Organized by graduate students in the program, the two-part exhibition features work at the intersection of art, science and technology, highlighting research and creative projects in areas such as interactive and immersive media, artificial intelligence, robotics, data visualization, physical computing and digital fabrication.

The first event will be held Tuesday, June 3, from 5 to 8 p.m. at the California NanoSystems Institute in Elings Hall on the UCSB campus. Visitors will experience research demonstrations, media installations and immersive experiences, including access to the program’s AlloSphere, a three-story instrument for scientific and artistic exploration. 

The second event takes place Thursday, June 5, from 6 to 10 p.m. at the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science and Technology (SBCAST) in downtown Santa Barbara. As part of the city’s First Thursday art walk, the evening will feature installations, performances and projection mapping, along with live music by the MAT Create Ensemble.

The show’s title, “Deep Cuts,” reflects the curators’ intention to surface complex and sometimes overlooked work. The exhibition text frames the term in two ways: as “obscure or lesser-known pieces of work by a musician, artist, technologist, designer, researcher, etc. — often overlooked, yet deeply meaningful to those who know them,” and as “severe reductions in funding or support, particularly in education, the arts and research — threatening the survival of programs that exist at the edge of visibility.”

In describing the nature of the work being shown, the curators write, “This exhibition is our reveal. It surfaces what’s often unseen: the quietly radical, the structurally complex, the playfully subversive.” They characterize the program’s approach as one in which “technology is not just a tool — it’s a creative co-conspirator shining light into the unknown.”

Participants in this year’s show include Sabina Hyoju Ahn, Alejandro Aponte, Sam Bourgault, Emma Brown, J.D. Brynn, Deniz Caglarcan, Ana Cárdenas, Pingkang Chen, Payton Croskey, Ashley Del Valle, Colin Dunne, Diarmid Flatley, Devon Frost, Yuehao Gao, Amanda Gregory, Joel A. Jaffe, Nefeli Manoudaki, Ryan Millet, Ryan Millett, Megumi Ondo, Lucian Parisi, Iason Paterakis, Weihao Qiu, Marcel Rodriguez-Riccelli, Jazer Sibley-Schwartz, Mert Toka, Anna Borou Yu, Emilie Yu, Yifeng Yvonne Yuan, Karl Yerkes and Shaw Yiran Xiao.

The Media Arts and Technology program at UCSB is an interdisciplinary graduate program that combines elements of engineering, the humanities, the sciences and the arts. The end of year show is part of its ongoing MAD AIM initiative, which focuses on media arts and design and AI + media.