Interdisciplinary arts

Interdisciplinary Arts is an academic department in the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago. As one of the earliest interdisciplinary arts programs in the United States, it has been an incubator for new approaches towards art making that has shaped the development of arts professionals for over thirty-three years. Guided by the principle that interdisciplinarity "is a defining characteristic of contemporary art practice" and "a necessary prerequisite for those artists who will shape the future of creative practice", the artists who work in the Interdisciplinary Arts department investigate new terrain. Examining concepts, forms and techniques from across the fine, performing and media arts, students work with a diverse array of unique and experimental approaches that interrogate artist books, installations, gesture and movement, sound art, durational performance, interactive media, video, performance media, papermaking, letterpress, etching and offset printing, electronically controlled artworks, online artwork, performance in artificial spaces, democratic multiples, written, spoken and performed text, dramatic forms, DIY/DIT collaborative strategies and relational art forms.