CRCA provided support for numerous projects that intersect with the fields of New Media Art, Software Studies, Game studies, Art/Science collaborations, Mixed Reality, Experimental Music, Digital Audio, Immersive Art and Networked Performance over its 40 year history.
[1] CRCA was originally founded by composer Roger Reynolds as the Center for Music Experiment (CME) in 1972, and was directed for many years by F. Richard Moore.
The center was renamed and the scope widened when artist and artificial intelligence pioneer Harold Cohen became Director in 1993.
CRCA, as an Organized Research Unit (ORU) at UCSD, ended on July 1, 2012.
Artists and researchers at CRCA have been involved in numerous technoscience research projects, such as Sheldon Brown's work on Game Design focusing on algorithmic generation of 3D game environments in Scalable City,[8] the Software Studies Initiative's work developing data visualizations of large sets of cultural data[9] and Micha Cárdenas' 365 hour Becoming Dragon project, about which Katherine sweetman of San Diego City Beat said "nobody has ever 'lived' in virtual reality continuously for so long".