Experimental research between myself, Dino Fizzotti MSc at the Dept. of Electrical Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand and Jill Ross Fine Art Printer with David Krut Fine Arts.
The Digital Arts Division of Wits School of Arts has a strong relationship with the Dept. of Electrical Engineering. This project was born out of a co-teaching the use of Arduino to Digital Arts students. Arduino Boards are wonderful but expensive and hard to import for regular use. Fizzotti suggested that we make them ourselves at a quarter of the cost.
I saw this as an opportunity to experiment with the cross-over between fine arts etching and printing and some playful and experimental circuitry. The research was a major success spawning interest from both the arts and engineering community. We hope to run workshops next year that will have inner city electronics experts and artists in the same room.
Arduino in the Print Studio from Tegan Bristow on Vimeo.
This experiment led to this paper: Paper written for the Practice Led Research Colloquium held at the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture at the University of Johannesburg in Oct. 2009. It was present again at the Research Seminar Series at Wits University in November 2009. This paper takes a critical look at Rosalind Krauss’s Post-Medium Condition in relation to it’s failures and the potential inherent in the obsolescence of older art mediums. This critical assessment frames experimental research in the cross over between fine arts etching techniques and electronics circuitry development. The initial documentation of this experimental research can be found under the project Arduino in the Print Studio.
Please visit this flickr set here.