Digital arts is by nature a hybrid practice, integrating the poetics, aesthetics and conceptual strategies of art with the logical, systematic methods of technological processes from engineering and the sciences. This article reviews the development of interdisciplinary, collaborative arts-engineering research and education at the University of California at Santa Barbara, focusing on the Media Arts Technology graduate program from a visual/spatial arts perspective.

The authors reflect on the experiences of collaboration between artists and scientists at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They outline the measures that enable both media artists and computer scientists to benefit from the collaborations. In particular, if long-term collaborations are to be successful, the collaborators must garner rewards not only in the field of the collaboration but also in their own respective academic or professional fields.