Project #CyborgArt: A Teaching Case Study on the Affordances Programmable Sensors in Mixed Media Art Projects

Abstract

Modern graduates of all disciplines require proficiency with new literacies to complement and enhance traditional higher-level education. Local and multinational businesses struggle to source graduates with both practical skills, an understanding of the modern consumer, and the challenges of integrating technology safely into almost every facet of life. This paper presents a multi-disciplinary module project that required students to create a mixed-media art piece representing the students’ vision of themselves as cybernetic organisms. The module was delivered over one semester and incorporated industry speakers and workshops on non-traditional topics for the discipline of these students. One of these topics was Coding for Non-Coders and Wearable and Embeddable Technology. This paper examines the affordances the students gained by learning how to incorporate simple, cheap but effective sensors in their art.

Keywords

• graduate skills, modern consumer, human, technological, & data literacies, computational thinking, wearables, sensors