Teaching

“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.

The cooperation between Bauhaus University Weimar and Friedrich Schiller University Jena is funded by the Bauhaus University Weimar’s Creative Fund: “Open Photonics – Light at the Intersection of Art and Science.”

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 very beginner-friendly workshop with little or no prior coding experience.

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...