Brett Ian Balogh

A rapidly increasing variety of objects in everyday life are acquiring an awareness of their environments, a repertoire of behaviors, and the ability to communicate with other objects, their owners, or, through networks, with more comprehensive integrated systems. This class explores the design processes, skills, and tools necessary to thrive in this exciting creative domain. The course incorporates substantial hands-on development experience in a lab environment. Students will conceptualize, prototype, and build working objects that respond to and cooperate with their owners and with each other.

Even though we live in a primarily analog world, most of our experience of modernity is digital. We will examine the similarities and differences of these two worlds through the lens of electronics, focusing on the role of analog systems in art-making. The course provides a hands-on exploration of analog sound and video circuit elements and systems as well as a survey of relevant artists, artworks and practices. Students will be able to make a variety of works, including performance, interactive objects and environments, still images, audiovisual instruments, audio pieces, and video, to name a few. Course activities will be supported by the purchase of a kit of resources to facilitate hands-on exploration. Each student will research a topic of interest and will respond to it through the lens of their own practice in the creation of a final project. No prior skills in electronics or art and technology studies are required; however, curiosity and a willingness to learn are a must.

This course explores the use of radio, light and sound as media through which an artist can create a public voice. This course takes a hands-on, do-it-yourself approach to these media, providing a basic background in electronics theory and practice, as well as in programming and use of microcontrollers. Topics covered in this course include, but are not limited to, low-power radio, locative media, hactivism and culture-jamming. Some examples of activities include the construction of AM/FM radio transmitters and receivers, laser projectors, persistence-of-vision displays and mobile audio rigs. A survey of the artistic significance of these media will be conducted throughout the course. Students are expected to research and present their findings in class, as well as to produce a personal or collaborative final project that augments their own practices.

Societies, ecologies and organisms are complex systems that require coordination among their disparate elements to function. These biological systems accomplish this by communicating in a variety of different ways: sound, light, touch, chemical messaging, the exchange of genetic material and electrical impulses. This studio art course critically examines the variety of ways simple biological systems communicate through the lens of contemporary discourse around posthuman roles in the anthropocene and its attendant problems of mass extinction, climate change, clean energy and dwindling resources. The course will examine examples of biological communications among multicellular and unicellular non-human organisms and will draw on a history of artwork in the field of bioart. The studio asks the student to identify (speculate) ways they can intervene in, mimic or participate in these communication networks in order to inspire empathy and establish new ways of interspecies communication. Course activities will be supported by the purchase of kit whose contents will serve as tools to facilitate observation, recording, measurement and conversation with the subjects of our explorations. Each student will research a topic of interest and will respond to it through the lens of their own practice in the creation of a final project. No prior skills in electronics or art and technology studies are required; however, curiosity and a willingness to learn are a must.

Much of our everyday experience is mediated by electronics. From toasters to smart phones, the devices we interact with vary widely in their function and complexity, but all are composed of a set of common electronic components and function in ways determined by the connection of these components. This course provides an introduction to electronic theory as it relates to the connection of these components. Topics to be covered will include but are not limited to reading schematics, DC and AC circuits, passive and active devices, filters, amplifiers and oscillators. Students will not only learn theory, but will also learn by constructing their own circuits by hand and by using circuit simulation and analysis tools in this laboratory course. Student learning will be assessed through weekly homework and laboratory assignments as well as several exams.

This course provides an introduction to the physics of sound and how it is percieved by the ear. We produce and store sound in many different ways, using it in medicine, environmental studies and even in new methods of refrigeration. This course covers the concepts and application of acoustics, including sound wave theory, sound in music and musical instruments, recognition of musical sound qualities, auditorium acoustics and electronic reproduction of sound.