Teaching

What do we see when we see—and what happens when light and optics transform our perception?

Light and optics shape our perception of the world. They create images, transform spaces, direct our attention, and can make both the visible and the invisible perceptible. Reflections, shadows, colors, projections, movement, and afterimages open up a fascinating space between physical reality and subjective experience—and with it, diverse possibilities for artistic and design experiments.

In this project module, we will explore light, optics, and perception as artistic and design materials. The focus is on experimenting, observing, creating disruptions, and developing new forms of seeing and experiencing. Starting points may include everyday observations, scientific findings, historical apparatuses, or contemporary technologies. Objects from collections such as the German Optical Museum Jena can also serve as inspiration for developing new works. Rather than being considered primarily as historical exhibits, they will be approached as starting points for new artistic and design ideas.

Based on research, experimentation, and prototyping, students will develop their own artistic and design projects. A variety of media and technologies may be used, combining analogue and digital approaches. Particular emphasis will be placed on a playful and experimental engagement with light, optics, and perception. Surprise, illusion, orientation and disorientation, visibility and invisibility can serve as starting points, as can questions about how technological systems extend or transform our perception.

Guest lectures and discussions from the fields of art, design, science, and technology, as well as collaborative experiments and prototyping sessions, will support the development of the projects. The aim of the project module is to conceive and realize an independent artistic or design work engaging with light, optics, or perception. The works should not merely communicate knowledge, but rather generate curiosity, challenge perception, invite experimentation, and enable new experiences.

The German Optical Museum Jena provides a possible point of reference for exploring the history, technology, and culture of seeing. The focus, however, remains on students’ own experimental practice at the intersection of art, design, science, and technology.

Prof. Martin Hesselmeier

With this project module students can initiate their own self-directed project, while still being provided conceptual and technical support. Students are encouraged to propose a practice-based artistic/design research project that is in line with their own interests and growing body of work. We support proposals that aim to arguably develop the students’ portfolio, skills and overall work in the field of:

Interactive Art / Light Art / Energy Harvesting / Physical, Tangible Computing / Spatial Interaction / Architectural Interfaces / 2D/3D Prototyping & Printed Electronics / Mobile, Location-based Applications / Artistic Research / Embodied Data / Media Archaeology

Timon Bohn, Ting-Chun Liu, Lotta Stöver, Prof. Martin Hesselmeier

This class explores, what other ways exist, to store and memorize information. From physical materials such as magnets, sound, light, or even skin, to screen based formats like pixels, YouTube videos and random images on the internet. 

We will examine the moment when (digital) information becomes manifested in the (material) world. What poetic potential emerges, when it becomes exposed to decay, and information begins to blur, fade, and alter.

The class engages in techno-critical questions concerning memory infrastructure. Who stores our data? What systems are required to transfer information from one place to another? And what socio-political implications arise from the infrastructures in which these processes are embedded? If information is circulating endlessly between servers, is it thereby stored?

We will also explore, which projects already deal (or dealt) with alternative storage techniques, in areas such as  permacomputing, feminist server practices and media archeology.

In order to engage with these topics, the class is accompanied by hands-on workshops, where we will work with microcontrollers, motors and sensors to speculate how these technologies can be used to write, read, and eventually store data.

These workshop sessions will focus on a soft (or beginner-friendly) introduction to these technologies. The goal is to get a fundamental understanding on how they function, in order to be able to work, tinker, debug and integrate them within your work(s).

Timon Bohn

Our everyday lives are heavily influenced - if not enabled - by machines: from steam and internal combustion engines, energy grids, networks of banking servers, computers, medical apparati, mining excavators, smartphones, over oil pipelines, to (AI) datacenters. Time is at the center of many of those technological developments. While new technological developments are often narrated as carriers of progress itself, we find this today in an enormous contrast with how far possible futures are still imaginable as inhabitable. The awareness of the impact of technologies on our lives is not new in any way. Yet, almost on a daily basis, we are confronted by the impact machines have on our time ecologically, meteorologically, geologically, socially, and economically.

Meanwhile on a personal scale, media-technologies are immensely impacting how we perceive the duration of time itself: instant communication messengers, immersive games, doom-scrolling on social media are just a few examples where media are manipulating our time perception. Machines differentiate, standardize, synchronize, monetize, and partially automate time. They can accelerate particular experiences while making actually lived time feel more pressured, fragmented, or permanently unfinished.

From the microtemporal sub-nanosecond speed of a modern processor core cycle, over the ca. 50 ms 5G network latency, the ca. 200 ms it takes our nerves to form a thought, over hours spent as media time, queer time (Halberstam), over the 17 weeks of the upcoming lecture-period of the winter semester, to the geological deep time of millions of years to compress swamp peat into coal: We will situate our practice and research efforts within and across those different time scales. The passing of time becomes the source material for our art and design time machines. How do machines induce (or generate) different notions of time? What kinds of personal, subjective, playful, critical or poetic approaches to time, temporality, intervals, and durations can we come up with, and how can these be enacted - by technological (or non-technological) means? Can machines make time raw?

The goal of this Fachmodul will be to open up a collective space-time continuum where different conceptions of time can materialize in individual or group projects.

Possible outcomes may be (non-exhaustive list): self-built time machines, techno-fossil installations, interactive objects of very slow or very fast technological intervention, memento mori apparati, time-centered and time-based media (including software art), mechanical time performances, media archaeological re-enactments of past technological/machine setups, …

Besides sessions with soldering, 3D-printing, lasercutting, reading, and programming, this Fachmodul involves a series of critical/poetic technological exercises, some with a series of practical tutorials.

Lotta Stöver

A theoretical and practical introduction of the Interface Design 3D-Print Lab. 

We look into the capabilities of the 3D printers provided by the lab, different materials that can be printed and safety regulations when operating the printers. 

In a hands-on design and 3D modelling session, we will use different (open & closed source) prototyping tools, to see what is possible to print, how to prepare 3D model files and ultimately get them printed.

Participation in the workshop is required to access the 3D printing lab and operate the printers.

Timon Bohn

This course will focus on the parametric design-to-fabrication workflow. We will explore various software tools and computational logic, learning how to translate digital models into physical artifacts using Rhino and Grasshopper. Parametric design treats form as a rule-governed system: change a parameter, and the entire design updates accordingly. The course covers three phases:

1. Parametric Thinking (theory and research);
2. Design-to-Fabrication Practice (including laser cutting, standard 3D printing, and clay 3D printing);
3. Integrated Project (applying the newly acquired skills to your own self-directed project).

Taught by MA student Yuerong Zhang

What happens to electronics after they die? This module bridges hardware hacking and critical media theory. The goal is to ground this practice in theory while exploring how building our own hardware can be a radical act of political and creative autonomy. 
Contemporary society throws away an astonishing amount of hardware: printers that gave up years ago, monitors nobody claimed, a mobile phone only a few years out of date. In this module we treat this as a resource rather than a tragedy. You’ll salvage dead electronics, open them up and build something else: a cyber-artifact.

Taught by MA students Aysenur Eryilmaz and Rory Doyle

Energy is the main driving force or our society; energy is political; energy is invisible. In previous centuries, energy appeared to be an inexhaustible resouce. Today, we know that using it sustainably and efficiently is crucial for our future on planet Earth. We need to rethink our approach. Instead of looking down into the earth for oil and gas, let´s start looking up to the sky for our energy. In the project module Batteries Not Included – Solar Energy as Artistic Material, we will search for the mysterious, speculative, humorous and imaginative use of renewable energy to enable artefacts to become self-sufficient.

The focus is on generating energy with the help of the sun. In the course of the project module, we will design reactive and interactive objects that feed exclusively on solar energy. This can lead to uncontrollable, complex superimpositions that can astonish, surprise or even disturb us in their appearance, both visually and sonically. The independent life of things, their autonomy and self-sufficiency are at the centre of their presence.

Prof. Martin Hesselmeier

With this project module students can initiate their own self-directed project, while still being provided conceptual and technical support. Students are encouraged to propose a practice-based artistic/design research project that is in line with their own interests and growing body of work. We support proposals that aim to arguably develop the students’ portfolio, skills and overall work in the fields of:

Interactive Art / Light Art / Energy Harvesting / Physical, Tangible Computing / Spatial Interaction / Architectural Interfaces / 2D/3D Prototyping & Printed Electronics / Mobile, Location-based Applications / Artistic Research / Embodied Data

Prof. Martin Hesselmeier, Brian L. Clark, Ting-Chun Liu, Lotta Stöver

A mandatory theoretical and practical introduction for new users of the new Interface Design 3D-Print Lab.

This Blockmodul will give participants an overview of the rules and safety regulations for accessing and working in the 3D-Print Lab, as well as an insight into 3D printing, from modeling with different prototyping tools to preparing objects for printing.

Jesús Velázquez

The Printed Circuit Board (PCB) has become the default architecture of the electronic devices that are driving our largely technologically-mediated reality: Electronic components on two-dimensional stacked layers are routing power and signals, energy and material, usually optimized towards signal integrity, power efficiency, profitable use of material, etc.

A part of this Fachmodul will be to give an introduction to common PCB design and manufacturing practices, with a large emphasis on interventions in the underlying conventions and assumptions that are implied by the state of the art, industrial "best" practices: What happens if the PCB becomes an open space? What alternatives architectures can we imagine if we come up with our own experimental, irrational, expression-oriented rules? What new dys/functions, alternative energy regimes and materialities, shapes and overall new artistic and design gestures may result from that? In this Fachmodul we will no longer pretend to be electrical engineers, but instead try to discover electronics as a spatial medium in itself.

Lotta Stöver

This course is a hands-on exploration of how interactive systems can sense and respond to their surroundings, with a particular focus on energy harvesting in electronic and interactive artworks. As computing moves beyond the familiar paradigm of screen, keyboard, and mouse, we will explore how devices can operate within and in relation to the physical world.

Rather than treating energy as an invisible resource, we will approach it as a central design consideration; something that must be captured, transformed, and negotiated. Through this lens, sensors and actuators become not only technical components, but means of mediating relationships between systems and their environments.

Along the way, you will develop fundamental skills in electronics and embedded programming, while engaging with broader questions about how interactive systems are powered, sustained, and situated.

Brian Larson Clark

In this hands-on course students will learn the basics of photogrammetry workflows as a basis for bridging the transition from the physical world to digital 2D and 3D environments.

Participants will work with photogrammetric equipment (namely digital cameras and laptops) and specific processes and programs to retrieve accurate geometry and position data in order to recreate objects and/or scenarios in a virtual three-dimensional space.

Basic knowledge in digital photography as well as basics in 3D modeling are recommended.

Jesús Velázquez

"Light is the first condition of all visibility."

This project module is dedicated to the topic of light as an artistic and creative material. Light is omnipresent: it makes things visible, yet it is transparent itself. It lends spaces tranquillity, creates spatial presence, and makes spaces disappear. It is both representation and a means of representation – a fascinating material for artists and designers.

Digital technologies enable us to think of light in dynamic, responsive, and interactive ways, challenging us to develop new forms and modes of interaction.

A cooperation and joint exhibition with the Lichtwerkstatt Jena at the Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, is planned. The makerspace works at the interface of knowledge and technology transfer between research, industry, and the regional maker community.

Together with this community of students, scientists, and hobbyists, ideas are to be exchanged, experimented with, developed, and prototyped in a hackathon format. The aim is to develop the potential of the interdisciplinary perspectives of art, design, technology, and research on the topic of light and create new approaches.

With this project module students can initiate their own self-directed project, while still being provided conceptual and technical support. Students are encouraged to propose a practice-based artistic/design research project that is in line with their own interests and growing body of work. We support proposals that aim to arguably develop the students’ portfolio, skills and overall work in the fields of:

Interactive Art / Light Art / Energy Harvesting / Physical, Tangible Computing / Spatial Interaction / Architectural Interfaces / 2D/3D Prototyping & Printed Electronics / Mobile, Location-based Applications / Artistic Research / Embodied Data

Prof. Martin Hesselmeier, Lotta Stöver

A mandatory theoretical and practical introduction for users of the new Interface Design 3DPrintLab.

This Blockmodul will give participants an insight into 3D printing, from modeling with different prototyping tools to prepare objects for printing, evaluating and selecting appropriate materials.

Digital and physical workflows.

Jesús Velázquez

Rooted in a hands-on exploration of designing and building interactive systems that sense and respond to their surroundings, this course delves into the role of light in electronic and interactive artworks. As we extend computing beyond the traditional paradigm of the screen, keyboard, and mouse, we will learn how to integrate sensors and actuators to create devices that can interact directly with their environment.

Along the way, we’ll cover fundamental technical skills in electronics and embedded programming, while gaining a deeper understanding of light-centered interactions and how to design interfaces for non-screen-based devices. This is a student-driven course. Your ideas and interests will shape where we go.

Brian Larson Clark

This Fachmodul consists of a series of practical artistic and design research experiments. Together we will explore what generative art + design have to do with regenerative practices, such as renewable energies, recycling materials, permacomputing, and overall doing art and design in the context of ongoing ecological crises. Especially within the current trend towards increased energy and resource consumption of big corporations' generative AI, this seminar aims to develop sensitivities together to be able to respond to that in critical, creative and alternative ways.

Starting with a research phase into traditions of generative visual and sound-based art and design classics to contemporary positions, each student or group develops their own research question. Throughout the semester we will practically develop artistic and design prototypes that are able to respond to these research questions.

In the beginning of the class, we will do some practical and conceptual exercises. These are some initial questions that we will try to work out to get started:

• What are the implied poetics, gestures and temporalities of doing something over and over again? (And what does this have to with life, ecology, sustainability, etc?)
• How can we write a code/protocol that can be executed with our bodies? (For example to take a walk or generate a performance?)
• How can we design systems that are affected by generative forces that lie outside of our human control?

The syllabus is partially student-driven, so after the first few sessions we will conceptually and practically steer the content Fachmodul together towards the directions of what we find interesting.

Suggested project formats may range over installations, performances, sculptures, (public or private) interventions, audio/visual, designed systems, writing, machines, net art, experimental setups, eco-feminist action, workshops, photographs, protocols, self-hosted solar servers, DIY printed electronics, and lastly: what other formats make sense to you!

Keywords: renewable, matter, energy, recycling, feedback loops, small data, interfacing with environments, symbiogenesis, permacomputing, emergence theory, artificial photosynthesis, autopoiesis/sympoiesis, post-anthropocentrism, hacking, flows, trash, parasitism and symbiosis, hybridity, speculative fiction, etc.

Tools: Processing, material research, qualitative research, custom electronics, PCB manufacturing, recycling, circuit bending, OpenSCAD + 3D printing, etc.

Lotta Stöver

In this hands-on course, students will delve into the fundamentals of photogrammetry workflows as a foundational step in transitioning from the physical realm to digital 2D and 3D environments. This course emphasizes practical skills in working with photogrammetric equipment, primarily digital cameras, and mastering specific processes to extract precise geometry and positional data. The acquired knowledge and skills will empower participants to recreate real-world objects and scenarios within a virtual three-dimensional space.

This block seminar will introduce the basics of volumetric and temporal rendering and imaging with such techniques as Neural Radiance Fields and Gaussian Splatting.

Introduction to specific photographic acquisition methodology.

Jesús Velázquez

In this block workshop we will playfully approach text-based programming in a creative coding manner. We start with an introduction into Processing (a beginner-friendly ((and open source yay! 🎉 )) programming environment developed for artists and designers).

The main aspect of this workshop will be learning together how to generate text-based code from scratch, focused on using NI-enabled (natural intelligence) brain-powered programming functionalities ;)

Apart from basic idea of code, we want to have some fun with image disruption with you, on how to glitch aka inject, distort, manipulate, fail, analyze, destroy, reorder, mutate [... etc ...] digital pixel-based images.

While it is of course an advantage if you have some programming knowledge, we are offering this super beginner-friendly workshop with little or no prior coding experience.

Lotta Stöver, Ting-Chun Liu

Professionalism is a weird thing in the art and design world. While people expect artists' works to be perfectly documented, being perceived *too professional* may seem cold - or even worse: too commercial ;) Navigating un/professionalism can be tricky. That's why we're offering this workshop: So instead, you can become SuperPro© (or just learn and practice some useful documentation techniques with us...)

Let's talk about why high quality photos and videos of your work are important, and what are some good strategies to building a neat, but personal portfolio. We want to discuss and practice with you how to do quick process documentations, how to set up your works for more detailed and polished documentation (either in situ or in a studio), and how to edit and post-process your photographs so that they look great in a catalogue, printed out portfolio, your social media feed, your online portfolio, etc...

Jesús Velázquez, Lotta Stöver