The research conducted in the program reflects the rapidly transforming knowledge systems and digital media economies emerging from the substantial technological shifts currently taking place in our society. Digital creative work and critical media literacy play a defining role in our information society and are transforming all aspects of contemporary life, including the way many professional visual artists, multimedia performers, writers, publishers, digital humanists and archivists pursue their practice.

Traditional scholarly and creative work outputs such as the single-authored print book or conventional gallery exhibitions have already been challenged by the emergence of multi-authored, multi-modal and forms of transmission that are analog/digital hybrids. IAWP is unique in how its internationally renowned and affiliated faculty collaborate with graduate students probing the significance of a digitally expanded, process-based research environment located in a cluster of interdisciplinary research labs.

The program provides a rigorous yet flexible creative work environment - especially by way of the Techne Lab and the Media Archaeology Lab - that leads to the creation of new and hybridized forms of art, experimental writing, performance, scholarship, theory, design, curation, exhibition and publication appropriate for our current cultural moment. In short, the program concentrates its curriculum on the cultivation of cutting-edge investigations into the practice, theory, history and philosophy of media and its relationships to creativity, communication, technology and information.

— Source: University of Colorado Boulder's website