This studio course introduces students to the theory and practice of Responsive Arts. Students will learn fundamental practices of electronic arts and interaction design such as basic electronics, circuit design, and programming for interactivity.

Through hands-on exercises, students will explore basic electronic techniques and use programmable micro-controllers to control interactive art, sound, light, and environments. In-class lectures, video, and web resources will illustrate issues of how to design and think about interactive art and environments today – as well as how to create them from a technical point of view.

The Critical Research Studio 1scale1 will run 7 simultaneous workshops in open software and hardware for designers and artists. Themes will be related to either physical computing or computer vision. There are both basic and advanced workshops that vary in length between 2 and 3 days.

Workshop Instructors and advisors include: Casey Reas, Tom Igoe, David Cuartielles, Julio Obelleiro, Emanuelle Mazza, Fernando Barrajon.

Medialab-Prado will hold a series of workshops that will be structured in subject-specific modules. A work-group will be set up for each of these modules, and it will be coordinated by one or more tutors who count with expertise in the subject area. Aside from advising and taking part in the practical work process, the tutors-coordinators can organize occasional theoretical sessions on specific subjects which can be of interest to the group. Therefore, the emphasis will be on both favoring the exchange of ideas among the participants of each group, and the exchange of ideas and the stimulating of new projects among the different modules.

In the module organized by Julio Obelleiro and Martín Nadal, we will concentrate on the creation of audio-visual installations which can be interfaced through a video camera (or other elements, such as microphones, etc.). We will approach the different computational techniques of vision and the strategies for real-time image and sound manipulation.

For quite a few decades now, society as a whole, and particularly the artistic community, have had to get used to new concept derived from the introduction of new technologies into our way of life and our work. The advent of the Internet, and using computers and electronics on a daily basis have become part of artistic practices: not only in production but also in the concepts underlying creation. Nowadays, whether in creating a short script in Flash or a sophisticated artificial vision program, certain basic programming concepts are needed.

In this workshop, basic programming concepts will be taught to be able to understand and write programming source code. We will do so by focusing on artistic uses, with no previous computer knowledge necessary. We will do samples in several programming languages used in artistic creation (ANSI C/C++, Processing, Pure Data, Arduino, etc.). We will explore the algorithms that lie behind some historical art works made via programming, and we will work on them with today’s tools.