WORKSHOP: Handmade Circuits: Electronic Sculpture

Handmade Circuits: Electronic Sculpture

[img]http://www.3rdward.com/storage/websiteimages/class-images/circuits3d.jpg[/img]

Location
573 Metropolitan (btw Lorimer & Union), Brooklyn

Date: Sundays June 20 & 27
Time: 2:30pm - 6:30pm
Registration Deadline: June 16
http://www.3rdward.com/3rdwardclasses/handmade-circuits-electronic-sculpture.html

An introduction to the art of electronic sculpture. Learn how to solder circuits in a point-to-point, free-form fashion and build circuits that you can weave into fabric.

On the first day you will create a light controlled oscillator and a LED flasher from a hand full of transistors, resistors, and capacitors. They can take any form you choose—from abstract, compact to bug-like! From beam bots to the electronic sculpture work found in contemporary art practices, we'll begin with a quick overview of free-form 3D circuits in application. We'll then talk a bit about the electronics theory involved in our LED flasher, covering voltage, current, resistors, capacitors and transistors. The solder will fly as we build our little LED flasher sculptures. Take home as many flashers as you can build!

On the second day you will design and weave an interactive, light controlled LED flasher circuit into burlap stretched over a wood frame. Integrating electronics into textiles is an exciting technical challenge that we will tackle with common components and materials. Though our specific project won't necessarily be wearable, it's definitely not your standard green printed circuit board, and the technique may be incorporated into paintings or sculptures.


Instructor
Phillip Stearns (AKA Pixel Form) is a practitioner of sonic and visual arts; music composer and performer; electronics sculptor and installation artist. He views technology as a site for exploring the global society-environment system and how changes in the relationship between society and environment manifest in our technology—particularly as solutions to a cascading set of problems created by contemporary culture. Through the medium of networked systems, his work explores the horizons of information, politics, noise, control, proximity, subversion, corruption, interconnectedness and interrelatedness. Central to his practice as a visual artist and a performer are the use of custom electronics, hand-craft, hardware hacking, media technologies, and iterative processes marked by a judicial use of materials, restraint, simplicity, a careful balance between conceptual depth and playfulness. He has presented, performed, lectured, exhibited, led workshops, and screened works at various festivals, conferences, residencies, museums and institutions around the US, Latin America and Northern Europe.