Response to Workshop: Intro to Electronics for Art Teachers/Artists

Assignment #26: Share your experiences, thoughts, notes, learning about the workshop with Deren - Intro to Electronics for Art Teachers/Artists.

In this class, along with other art education classes, we've talked a lot about integrating new technologies into our classrooms as teachers in the future. We have talked about how to use the internet as a resource, or how to scan and print and copy as a creative outlet, or how to take traditional art mediums and use their technological equivalents to make art.

However, we weren't able to actually combine traditional and technological together the way we did during our workshop. We took traditional materials and added something technological, rather than finding a way to separate the two.

For example, our Drawdio pencils didn't enable us draw in a virtual space like a tablet does, but rather it focuses on the normalcy of a pencil to create physical graphite lines, and then adds another dimension to it - the audio.

Another sample, origami has been done for over four hundred years, and instead of say, letting a machine make origami for us, we still focused on the traditional folding aspect (though with directions on an iPhone or a directions sheet), and THEN added the technological dimension of motion.

I think that both of those projects are an excellent way of bringing the traditional with the technological, rather than using one to replace the other.