Earlier this week, the lab hosted a series of art+tech induction sessions for a group of 40 first-year art students from Liverpool Hope University.
The sessions were led by resident artists Radamés Ajna and Thiago Hersan, who prepared an introductory crash course on the history of media and electronic/digital art. The sessions then continued with a couple of hours of hands-on exercises where the students were introduced to the Linux operating system and the principles of networking, programming and physical computing, using the RaspberryPi platform.
Taking a hint from Marshall McLuhan, who said that “all media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical”, the exercises were organized to expose the poetic and psychic possibilities of everyday technologies and provoke the students to think about how technologies like a web camera, or the internet, are potential manifestations of some greater human desire for supernatural powers.
