COOL COURSE: Teaching Tech to Artists Gives them ‘Magic Power’

With a dramatic flourish, senior Ray Chen tipped a large chef's knife toward the ceiling before sinking it into a small white cake, causing its multi-colored lights to pulse. Chen's fellow students gasped, clapped, and laughed in delight.

"Do it again," begged a classmate seated across the black conference table. Chen obliged, and a different pattern of colored lights blinked.

"It feels like you're conducting with a knife," said teacher August Luhrs, as he snapped photos on his phone.

It was Weird Lamp Week in the Tisch School of the Arts course "Electronics for Artists," and Chen's vanilla chiffon cake-lamp kicked off the presentations. Undergraduate students enrolled in this Collaborative Arts class took turns showcasing their LED projects, including a traffic light desk lamp, a chandelier made with green bottles that lit up to the beat of music, a flashing necklace, and a blue floral hat embellished with strands of lights. Each presentation was met with applause and questions about the student-artists' processes, discoveries, and challenges.

Kally Hall lights her floral hat. Photo by Tracey Friedman.

Students are required to take the department's safety training at the start of the semester. Then under Luhrs's guidance, they learn the basics of electricity, soldering, fabrication, and circuit prototyping. These skills are the foundation for exploring how circuits can make music, move sculptures, illuminate a space, and create body-responsive fashion. The semester concludes with a gallery of their work.

"The goal is to expand their tool belt to include skills to help them make interactive art," Luhrs explains, adding that the structure of the class provides time and space to brainstorm, make a prototype, test it, and then refine it.

"It's more about art and performance than it is learning electrical engineering. How do we give them the tools necessary to implement their own creative vision, to deepen their own creative practice," he says. "They are already artists, screenwriters, dancers. How can tech augment those mediums?"

Luhrs starts the semester by having students build a simple circuit. He calls this first lesson "Intro to Magic Power."

"It is so absurd that we have this sparkle magic that exists all around us and we can hack into it. Maybe it will kill us but maybe it will make art," he says, laughing. "We start with lighting up a tiny LED bulb and once they see it light up I can also see the light bulb in their brain go off. It's this feeling of 'Oh my God, I can do this. I don't have to be an electrician. I can learn these principles and make something I didn't think I could make before.' It's always exciting."

Luhrs is an interactive artist who earned a master's degree in 2020 from Tisch's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he was a research resident in 2020-2021.

August Luhrs teaches Electronics for Artists at the Tisch School of the Arts. Photo by Tracey Friedman.

His students represent a wide range of interests, from visual art and film to drama, dance, and business. The Monday afternoon classes move from lecture and discussion to hands-on experiments and workshops. Some workshops have the vibe of The Great British Bake Off, where everyone helps each other master a challenge, Luhrs says.

"You know, where they look around and go, 'Oh, you're folding it three times instead of four?' And then they start doing that themselves and it starts to work and they're high fiving," he says. "There's something so satisfying with this hardware. When you get something to work, you can feel like a wizard."

Student Xim Montes De Oca demonstrates her wearable art lamp. Photo by Tracey Friedman.

The course is intended to provide a foundation for creative exploration.

"You're never going to get everything you need to know in these 14 weeks, especially because we're not only doing hardware, but we're also learning the software that's controlling the hardware," he says.

But learning new skills and having the space and time to discover new approaches will inform their practices for years to come.

"I really believe that everyone is creative, and we often put boxes around what is good creativity and what is capital 'A' art," Luhrs says. "So it's nice when students are able to just throw some junk together and make it light up or make it move or whatever and be like 'Yes, it's 'Art.'"