Robotics is often taught as a problem-solving discipline focused on efficiency, optimization, and functional outcomes. This course approaches robotics differently: as a creative, cultural, and experiential medium.
Rather than treating technology as neutral infrastructure, we examine robotic systems as expressive forms capable of producing meaning, perception, and embodied experience. Students are encouraged to think of robots not only as tools or machines, but as performative objects situated between engineering, art, and human experience.
The course emphasizes experimentation, iteration, and material exploration. Failure, breakdown, and unexpected behavior are treated as productive parts of the creative process. Technical rigor and conceptual inquiry are developed together; aesthetic decisions are understood as inseparable from engineering choices.
By combining studio art methodologies with engineering practices, students learn to:
The goal is not only to build functioning robots, but to cultivate a critical and creative understanding of how technological systems shape perception, culture, and experience.
This course operates as a hybrid engineering lab and studio art environment.
Students learn through three interconnected modes:
Students acquire foundational skills in electronics, programming, fabrication, and mechanism design through guided exercises. These provide the technical vocabulary necessary for creative exploration.
Open-ended experimentation allows students to explore motion, interaction, materiality, and aesthetics. Emphasis is placed on iteration, prototyping, and learning through making.
Readings, artist presentations, and critiques situate student work within histories of kinetic art, robotics art, systems art, and new media practice. Students develop the ability to discuss technical work conceptually and historically.