As a theoretically inclined maker and committed interdisciplinarian, separation of my teaching into ‘practical’ and theoretical aspects is never easy. I have become accustomed to offering classes on historical and theoretical topics in conventional lecture format, but my ‘studio’ classes tend to involve an active combination of theory and practice. Here I give brief praisees of several currently offered classes.
This class was created in response to the lack of familiarity with basic physical making practices among the born-digital generation. The class proceeds through a series of workshop assignment that help the students develop skills with basic tools, materials and production and design methods. Class begins with primers of different kinds of wood, the qualities of grain, and the handling and maintenance of elementary handtools – chisels, drills, rasps, vises and clamps. Work begin with the construction of a mallet from rough, unsawn timber. Attention is paid to 3D visualisation and elementary 3D design technical drawing. Class proceeds through increasingly sophisticated projects involving a variety of methods, materials and tools, including cutting, drilling and tapping mild steel.
This class focuses of the design and creation of things that move. It introduces concepts of structural integrity, mechanisms and precision measuring and fabrication. Structural considerations include conceptualisation of tension, compression and torsion forces, triangulation and the geometry of joinery. Diverse kinds of mechanisms are introduced: levers, cams, chains and gears, shafts and bearings. Students apply these lessons in project assignments that allow some creative invention. There is emphasis on drawing as an idea development and prototyping technique. Students complete the class with a self-initiated project that implements things learned in class.
This class teaches basic electricity theory, electromechanics and analog electronics, with special emphasis on building simple interactive systems using sensors and effectors. Class proceeds as a sequence of technical assignments each building on the previous, involving power electronics, simple sensing, process control and output stages. Students learn to identity and test component, to read and draw circuit diagrams, to lay out, solder and test circuit boards. Students complete the class with a self-initiated project that implements things learned in class.
This class begins with a survey of contemporary climate, environmental and sustainability issues. Students present research surveys to the class. This is followed by an consideration of deeper theoretical issues and approaches, invovling indigenous and non-western perspectives, the Gaia hypothesis and philosophical approaches such as deep ecology. Students then engage traditions of activism in the arts. They then conceive and realise a project that engages this subject matter and these concerns.
The general question I seek to explore in this lecture class is "How did we get here? - in order to more clearly understand and where it is we are. I encourage students to see the 'big picture’, the large-scale flow of history. We review the long C19th, taking the development of telegraph as an historical timeline (and as an instructive perspective on the development of the internet). We consider the development of precision mass production, the emergence of proletarian political thought, and the changing nature of city life as a result of industrialisation and electrification. We then look back at pre-industrial Europe and the events that led up to the industrial revolution - the reformation (and counter reformation), the transition out of baroque thought, the enlightenment and scientific revolutions, and changes in government and society in UK. We then move to C20th, focusing on cybernetics, the development of electronics and computing, changes in music as a result of recording technology, electric instruments and synthesisers. We look at the 60s - in arts and society - civil rights, feminism, the birth of the environmental movement, sputnik, NASA and the bomb. And then digital/internet culture, and finally, sustainability and climate change.
This lecture class introduces students to a range of new paradigms in the study of cognition – situated, distributed, embodied, enactive and extended - to provide ways of understanding the nature of embodied intelligent action – aspect of being human that conventional approaches in cognitive science and philosophy of mind have not adequately addressed. The motivation is that the arts epitomise embodied intelligent action. The arts have not been well served by mentalist approaches to cognition and the new paradigms provide a new vocabulary with which practitioners can articulate the nature of spatially, socially and material engaged intelligent action.