My research, creative practice, academic experience, and views on art education inform my teaching. It engages the experimental interplay between art, science, technology, and society to initiate meaningful transformations of human knowledge and experience. The focus is on the critical conceptualization for examining and conducting complex exploratory art practices in both analogue and digital media, ranging from computational generativity to interactive installations and post-conceptual techniques. My academic competencies intersect intensive experimental practice with extensive art historical and theoretical studies in traditional and new media art disciplines: drawing, painting, photography, installation, sound art, animation, video, game art, generative art, computational art, and interactive art. My enthusiasm for these art disciplines’ potentials is informed by the critique of their cultural contexts, ethical issues, and sociopolitical implications.
My relationship with students, faculty, and staff is informed by my love for the arts, passion for teaching and learning, and excitement for human communication. I cultivate a proactive, constructive, and responsible interpersonal approach, grounded in compassionate, forward-looking support for my colleagues' capabilities, needs, and goals. My teaching methodology centers on helping students develop effective research practices, production techniques, exploratory learning skills, and ethical values for the responsible creation of convincing and socially relevant artworks. It motivates and nurtures students’ courage, dedication, persistence, open-mindedness, reflection, reasoning, problem-solving, humility, and continuous cultivation of personal capacity for learning-driven growth.
In teaching digital arts, it is paramount to design an academic milieu that helps students engage effectively in a process of artistic research and technical skill acquisition centered on critical practice. Critical technical practice combines an understanding of a technology, both theoretical and practical, with a high degree of reflection about the epistemological foundations and metaphors used in technical language, as well as the examination of technical, cultural, and political assumptions that influence technological development and application. In parallel, it is essential to help students cultivate a somber, well-informed critical distance toward academic, theoretical, aesthetic, and market caprices and trends that influence the contemporary artworld and shape the wider reception of artistic practices. Therefore, I teach creative techniques by profiling their poetic and epistemic potentials within their social, historical, and theoretical contexts. In students’ work, I encourage intellectually open experimentation, critical thinking, assessment, and communication.
I encourage flexible, innovative, and proactive collaboration with fellow faculty members in designing and delivering multidisciplinary courses. I support integrating teaching with faculty research in project-based studios and labs. This creates a diverse and productive environment enriched by the disciplinary diversity among faculty, students, and external partners. The studio/lab research tracks I am interested in focus on generative, computational, and emerging media arts that can be developed into various introductory, intermediate, advanced, and special-topics courses. Beyond coursework, student engagement with the studio/lab includes seminars, internships, and micro-projects. Studio/lab’s research, external collaborative partnerships, and teaching outcomes help continuously refine and innovate the institutional goals.
Throughout my career, I have been creating inclusive learning environments that foster student diversity in areas such as expressive sensitivity, creative interests, race, class, ethnicity, national origin, gender identity, sexuality, and religion. I invite students to contemplate the transformative sociopolitical potential of art and explore the roles of their creative work and scholarship in mitigating the inequities that shape our world. In administrative positions, I have successfully secured inclusiveness and fairness in freshmen intake and student assessment, program planning and design, faculty integration, harmonizing teaching styles, intra- and inter-departmental relations, and policymaking.