SCI-Arc EDGE’S Fiction and Entertainment Postgraduate Program Receives Grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
SCI-Arc is pleased to announce it has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for SCI-Arc EDGE’s Fiction and Entertainment postgraduate program. Since 2016, SCI-Arc’s postgraduate program in Fiction and Entertainment has been furthering the school’s mission to nurture artists who engage with bleeding edge scientific advancements and research, generating work that bends and blurs the boundaries of art, architecture, science, and storytelling.
“The Sloan Foundation is delighted to award $200,000 to support students in the SCI-Arc Fiction and Entertainment postgraduate program as they explore AI and automation and integrate these innovative technologies into their multimedia fictional narratives, “ said Sloan Vice President and Program Director Doron Weber. “We are excited to partner with this visionary program at SCI-Arc and to discover the new visions to be created by these talented students bridging science and the arts.”
Employing techniques across the disciplines of film, animation, and gaming, students in the Fiction and Entertainment program create narratives that may take the form of short films, animations, music videos, documentaries, video games, VR and AR environments, theatre experiences, and/or performances. By developing unique bodies of work, these artists are poised to not just imagine, but actively prototype the unprecedented scenarios and cultural implications stemming from new and transformative technologies.
This year, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the program will develop new project collaborations between students, renowned figures from the entertainment industry, and leading scientists. Together they will author stories to engage broader audiences with critical ideas about the global, urban, and architectural implications of ever-shifting advances in automation and artificial intelligence. “Fiction has always been a medium through which our culture shares and disseminates ideas,” explains Fiction and Entertainment Program Coordinator Liam Young. “This grant helps us to create partnerships between storytellers from the worlds of film and gaming and important voices from science in order to connect the public to the emerging technologies that are changing our world.”
As one of the world’s leading architecture schools, SCI-Arc continues to explore new models for practical and artistic implications of architectural thinking. “Since its inception, SCI-Arc has had great ambitions for this innovative program,” says SCI-Arc Director and CEO Hernan Diaz Alonso, “and with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s support, we look forward to raising the bar even higher.”
About the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation:
The Fiction and Entertainment program is supported by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Public Understanding of Science, Technology & Economics program, which seeks to build bridges between science and the humanities by developing a common language for these disciplines to better understand and speak to one another—and ultimately to grasp that they belong to a single common culture. This long-standing multifaceted program aims to give people a keener appreciation for the increasingly scientific and technological world in which we live and to convey some of the challenges and rewards of the scientific and technological enterprise.