On Thursday evening ( June 5th) Studio Bricolage collaborated on our first art and technology workshop with the Learning Technologies Center (LTC) from the Science Museum of Minnesota.

This workshop introduced folks to the Arduino an inexpensive microcontroller from the Arduino website they describe it this way:

Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.

We (staff from Studio Bricolage and the LTC) see the Arduino as a wonderful way for artists to begin to make their art come alive. The Arduino lets you create movement, sound, light... it can be used to sense things in the physical world... so the thing you're making can have a sense of touch, or see a shadow. What this means to artists is that they can break down the wall between their work and the people who experience their work.

This was the first session of a two session workshop. We looked at some Arduino projects and sculptures, tried out the Arduino and the application you use to program it, and made some electronic circuits that the Arduino controlled ( turning on LED's and Motors)

We've heard that more folks are interested in the Workshop than we could fit in the first, so we're planning a second workshop in the coming month. We have an Arduino web page you can look at with links and information about the workshop