PROVIDENCE - Rhode Island School of Design recently announced that it will begin offering a Master of Fine Arts in Digital Media, scheduled to enroll its first students in the fall of 2003. Bill Seaman, a digital-media artist and a former professor of design/media arts with the University of California, Los Angeles, has been named head of the new department. RISD faculty voted last month to make the digital media program its own department. Seaman said in a written statement that the goal of the program is to provide an environment for artistic research and practice, focusing on the creative, expressive potentials of digital media. About 30 spots will be available for the two-year program, which will occupy space in RISD's new Center for Integrative Technologies in downtown Providence. Applicants should have the equivalent of four years of digital-media-related study, an education in media arts or a combined art/design education. The deadline to apply is March 1. More information is available at www.risd.edu/digital_media.cfm.

Heartlab chooses California firm for optical storage

LOS GATOS, Calif. - Westerly-based Heartlab Inc. recently chose an optical-storage product from PowerFile Inc. as a key part of Heartlab's medical-imaging storage solution, called Storsafe. The product's features include a 200-disc capacity, almost 1 terabyte of optical storage per unit, DVD-R drive technology for archiving and a 19-inch rack mount design for solution integration and scalability. Robert Petrocelli, chief executive officer of Heartlab, said the PowerFile product provides flexibility and cost-effectiveness for its next-generation medical imaging application.