Robotics and Art: Exploring Ambient Interfaces

This four-session virtual workshop focuses on the use of a mobile phone in taking photos, video, notes, sketches, and audio recordings to produce documentary work or just capture the memories of your daily life. This course is taught in a seminar format, with students engaging in discussion about the practical use and possibilities of the mobile phone to create personal memories, citizen journalism, photojournalism, and daily visual journaling. In addition, the workshop delves into the creative side of smartphone photography. Learn about vision, creative apps, and storytelling during talks and edit-and-critique sessions. Also included is sharing of work by Faculty, showing his wide range of work done with a smartphone since he did the New Yorker’s first “takeover” in 2012, along with reviewing the work in a group setting of each participant’s work.

Join an engaging exploration of the synthesis between two distinct art forms: photography and painting. Students discover transfer techniques that integrate photographic images and text directly onto painted surfaces, resulting in intriguingly layered works. Participants explore traditional collage and photomontage, and master new methods that allow for opaque and translucent layers. Reductive methods, such as sanding and scraping, reveal the history of earlier photographic layers and suggest an archaeological approach to image development. The workshop emphasizes experimentation and exploratory approaches. Students produce a portfolio of physical examples of all techniques.

Images and poetry have long shared a deep and resonant dialogue, each illuminating the other in unexpected ways. This workshop invites students to explore that intersection, using the visual language of photography to respond to and be inspired by the written word. In this workshop, students photograph, edit, print, and sequence a small body of work inspired by poetry. Each morning begins with group dialogues and critiques designed to help participants refine their narrative voice and strengthen their conceptual approach. Along the way, they are introduced to artists and writers who have merged image and text, expanding the possibilities of both. Working with a range of photographic techniques—including portraiture, landscape, appropriation, and alternative processes—students are guided in bringing a project from concept to final form, gaining confidence in experimentation and new ways of seeing. Field trips complement studio activities.