Digital Art

The Digital Art Program is devoted to creating original work in digital imaging, digital photography, digital video, motion graphics, desktop publishing, and web design with an emphasis on women, art and technology. The program provides a basic foundation in digital art to women in particular, enabling them to go on to careers in multimedia and web production.

A History of Digital Art at Scripps

The Digital Art Program at Scripps College is part of the Studio Art Department in the fine arts division. The program was established by Professor Nancy Macko in 1990 and she continues to direct it today. At that time the program was housed in a classroom in the Humanities Building. There were three Mac computers surrounded by 15 IBMs.

Since 1995 the computer art lab has been located in Lang Studios of the Millard Sheets Art Complex. The lab contains ten Macintosh Intel workstations, complete with the latest image, video, and audio editing software and other auxiliary equipment. The curriculum has also evolved in response to student interest, software development and market demands. Where we once relied upon simple imaging software programs like CricketDraw and SuperPaint for creating digital images, we now work with sophisticated state-of-the-art and commercially viable software such as Adobe Photoshop and AfterEffects, Quark Xpress, Dreamweaver, Flash and FinalCut Pro.

In 1998, we established the ARThive, a digital archive that houses the Scripps College Computer Art Archive—a database of over 1200 images created by students during the early years of the Scripps College Digital Art Program, 1990-1998—as well as student work from digital art classes from 2000 to the present. Please click here to view their work.

In 1999 Professor Tran,T. Kim-Trang joined the art department. Her expertise in motion graphics, digital video and web animation has enabled us to create a very strong program in the department of art at Scripps that allows us to work digitally with photography, film, video and print.