ED BENNETT: I'm Ed Bennett, and I'm the research specialist in the Art and Technology Department, and we're going to look at the context and tools that we used to develop the ArtBus project and explain like why it's here and what it does.

You always keep your eye open for what spinoffs you might have, and one of the spinoffs that we've had is learning how to do surface mount electronics. So, what makes surface mount surface mount, the reason it's even worth saying anything about it is because it's the key to making small things. What makes it possible is that the parts sit on top of the board instead of having pins that go through the board, so any contemporary piece of electronics -- well, they cleaned up, they’ve gone and cleaned up. Any contemporary piece of electronics is made with parts that sit on the surface of the board, hence the name surface mount, rather than having pins that go through the board.

This started like in the late 80s. These are through-hole components, and they are necessarily large because the holes can only be so close together. With these, they can be tiny fractions of a millimeter apart, so what we're learning how to do here is to work on this scale. I designed this board for surface mount components and as an experiment in pedagogy, and in just capability of the department, we've learned how to do this stuff.

So, the next step is shrinking it down one step further by going to an even finer pitch of surface mount so that hopefully we can cut the size of that board in half. By the way, I should have mentioned that this is an ArtBus analog input board, and we know that because it says [INDISCERNIBLE].

The surface mount is one of the spinoffs, one of the advantages that we have from doing the board. This is our electronics lab. What the room is for is for doing electronics at the intersection of media- and non-media-based art making. So, there's this area of overlap between media and non-media, and this is the area where we take care of things more like doing sound interfacing with computers and things like that. The workstations around the room, they're not actually old Mac computers; they're just old Mac monitors. These are where we program microcontrollers. We're using PIC chips at the moment. There are other platforms we’re looking at too.

We've had classes that used microcontrollers off and on since the middle 90s, and you know, as the tools change, we changed the lab. The microchip corporation PIC microcontroller product line is what we program here. I teach the class from time to time. We program and see, and it allows us to do standalone microcontrollers or it allows us to do interfacing to multimedia.

[A PERFORMANCE OF CHRIS BURKE WITH THE INTERACTOPUS]

ED BENNETT: The split between people who want to use microcontrollers for a dedicated control like for a kinetic art piece and the people who want to use it in multimedia is now about 50-50. So, when we teach a microcontroller class, the microcontroller class has to address both needs sets and both points of view. And again, one of those need sets and points of view is media related, say on video, and the other is no so media related because it has to do with object making that has no preexisting context.

The kinetics areas: They either always stick us in the back of the building or they hide us in the basement, and [PH] Anna is going to be surprised by us if she is in here. Anna is the facilities manager, and she has the whole lab torn apart right now for summer inventory and reorganization. So, we work with a lot of discarded and cast-off materials, especially mechanical components which are really, really hard to find.

GRETCHEN HASSE: How come?

ED BENNETT: Because, well for instance, this is a mag stock, a full coat deck from the Film-Video Department, and this is what they use. They had a servo system that locked a bunch of these to the film so you could do your editing or you could project things in real time, and it's just loaded with like really precious, hard-to-find, expensive mechanical components, but this is the end of the line; there's no more of this stuff out there, so it's really just to change to digital that is starting to cut in to our ability to scrounge.

We come from a different place than most people do. Anna normally keeps things like really ship shape, but she might be unhappy to know that we're taking pictures of this, but I love the grand and glorious mess. It makes me feel very much at home.

So basically, this lab, this is not a general-purpose shop. There's no band saw. We don't generally do much woodworking. This is basically for making parts that fit together for doing kinetic art, so this is where we come from. This is where our electronics sensibility comes from is doing this stuff. And there is a lot of crossover in the sound department too. We get a lot of their students who take electronics classes and they take things like the, well like the kinetics classes so that they can -- let me close this -- so that they can build their experimental instruments and so forth.