The genre of the outdoors sports film is well tread, and many students can attest to sitting through a roommate’s footage from a Mt. Hood ski trip, scored with obnoxious music and nauseatingly filmed with a GoPro.

This spring term, assistant professor Rick Silva led the course ARTD 410: “Stoked 101” to look into the craft behind action sports filmmaking. Silva says he dreamt of the “Stoked 101” course since he was a film student at the University of Colorado, where his professors discouraged students from producing ski films and music videos.

In his newest exhibit, Gristle Sausage, associate professor of digital arts Michael A. Salter plays the role of a meat grinder: He grinds graphics and memes and shapes them into a “all- you-can-eat visual buffet.”

The billboard-sized installation offers several framed graphics of colorful, pixelated patterns, blurry portraits, cartoon faces, pharmaceutical drugs, and more. The societal mosaic also features one-of-a-kind, minimal, kitschy knick-knack sculptures installed on the opposite wall.

In fall 2008, the University of Oregon completed its move into the White Stag Block (WSB), a refurbished facility that merges parts of three historic buildings in downtown Portland. The move culminated efforts—compressed into just two years—to adapt three vacant historic buildings into the interconnected high-tech complex that today comprises the School of Architecture and Allied Arts’ most urban presence. The building project is owned, managed, and leased by Venerable Group, Inc.

The A&AA community continues to take steps toward creating its future home on University Street. The location of the Phase I A&AA building is on the site of the current McArthur Court. To help keep interested constituents and stakeholders informed, a blog has been created to follow the progress of the “Phase I A&AA Learning and Innovation Hub” capital project. Here you can view documents and design studies that outline the design process, including reports, timeline, and correspondence. 

WIRED has featured Assistant Professor Rick Silva’s futuristic bird project in a recent issue. Silva teaches animation in the UO Department of Art’s Digital Arts Program.

Oxide, a new book by Craig Hickman, a professor in the UO Digital Arts Program, was featured in a recent issue of Hyperallergic.

Writer Allison Meier describes Hickman’s 128-page monograph as “[an] alternate reality with composites of photographs of decaying Americana, 19th and early 20th century U.S. Patent Office images, a 19th century costume text, and other archive imagery.”

Kartz Ucci, associate professor of digital arts, lost her battle with cancer on October 6. She was 52 years of age. Ucci joined the UO faculty in 2004 and taught art and digital arts in the Department of Art. Her courses were rich and powerful lessons on contemporary art practice, time-based media, and interactive installations.

The University of Oregon keeps coming up tops in national surveys of the flagship colleges in the United States. This summer, two national rankings included UO in the best of the best: the Fiske Guide to Colleges and U.S. News and World Report’s annual Best Colleges ranking.