Brett Ian Balogh

What can analog electronics teach us about making art in a world shaped by digital systems? This hands-on studio explores circuits as creative tools, focusing on sound, light, and motion as expressive media-without relying on code or software. Students can step outside the shadow of AI and mass computation to explore a more intimate relationship between materials, energy and creativity-while experimenting with performance, interactive objects, audiovisual instruments, and installations. Alongside studio practice, we will look at artists who have expanded the possibilities of analog media and study pioneering tools such as the Sandin Image Processor, a patch-programmable analog computer. Students will be invited to connect these histories and techniques to their own practices through the creation of a final project. No prior experience is required-only curiosity, imagination, and a willingness to learn.

How do organisms, environments, and technologies communicate with one another? This hybrid studio invites students to explore unconventional channels of interaction¿across human, non-human, and technological systems¿through hands-on experiments in art and science. Students will learn methods for growing and caring for organisms such as plants, fungi, and slime molds, and pair them with electronic interfaces to create surprising collaborations: mushrooms generating sound, houseplants controlling machines, or slime molds participating in digital processes. Along the way, students will gain skills in coding, electronics, and robotics, while considering the ecological and cultural contexts of interspecies communication. Course projects culminate in a final work shaped by each student¿s own practice. No prior experience is required¿only curiosity, imagination, and a willingness to experiment.

Much of our everyday experience is mediated by electronics. From toasters to smart phones, the devices we interact with vary widely in their function and complexity, but all are composed of a set of common electronic components and function in ways determined by the connection of these components. This course provides an introduction to electronic theory as it relates to the connection of these components.

Topics to be covered will include but are not limited to reading schematics, DC and AC circuits, passive and active devices, filters, amplifiers and oscillators. Students will not only learn theory, but will also learn by constructing their own circuits by hand and by using circuit simulation and analysis tools in this laboratory course.

Student learning will be assessed through weekly homework and laboratory assignments as well as several exams.

This course provides an introduction to the physics of sound and how it is percieved by the ear. We produce and store sound in many different ways, using it in medicine, environmental studies and even in new methods of refrigeration. This course covers the concepts and application of acoustics, including sound wave theory, sound in music and musical instruments, recognition of musical sound qualities, auditorium acoustics and electronic reproduction of sound.