When starting off his lecture, Ned Bartlett was sure to stress that technology is amazing when it works, that technology is a medium, and, like any medium, has a reason and has to have a purpose in an art piece. These might not be universal truths for everyone who utilizes creative technologies but, as someone who is interested in technology but not very familiar with it, they really resonated with me.
After the lecture, what interested me most about the Arduino was the open-source software and the accessibility it provided. I like that it is available to almost anybody, and the DIY sense that comes with that. Ned's "Space Ball" gave a really great idea of the things that are possible with the Arduino.
During the demonstration portion of the topic, I was really nervous about being totally Arduino-inadequate, but it ended up being as user friendly as promised and I was really excited when we got out LED blink at different intervals and even dim when it was translated to analog. I actually snapped a photograph of our Arduino set-up with my dying cell phone at the time, but I forgot to save my photos to my SIM card before getting a new phone and lost all of my photographs (which was pretty disappointing and further proof to my tech-illiteracy). However, it was a very simple set up and likely looked the exact same as every other Arduino in the class room, so it's probably not a great disaster that the documentation was lost.
While note related to Arduinos, Ned showed some other creative uses of technology at the end of his lecture and one in particular stood out to me. AR Art is an app that "breathes life into objects" by providing extra layers of information and the results are stunning.
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| still from arart.info's vimeo video |
