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ROUNDTABLE

Field Research

In the first part of the Art&Science Roundtable session Ondrej Merta presented “Standuino”, a project he is developing together with Vaclav Pelousek. Standuino started as a clone board of the popular Arduino but it is adapted to become very easily a musical instrument. This tool, as the Arduino, is user friendly and everyone could work with it in the creative field even without having a technical or theoretical background in electronics. Also the programming software programs, with their huge amount of hints in the Internet, are accessible for a broad public. The standuino project is not only about the board and the programming software but it offers as well several opportunities to enter the standuino world and have fun. For example in the workshop the electrical circuits are built to create music instruments and play with them alone or in a “standuino orchestra”.

 

Standuino, like arduino, is changing the world and ways of education because of its accessibility and simplicity. At the first “Maker Faire” in Rome a lot of mothers were buying it for their children. For Ondrej Merta is clear that the electronic toys like arduino are the starting point for the future generation. The way of playing of the children is changed: why buy a toy if it is possible to create it and print it with the 3D printer?
A Standuino workshop with Ondrej Merta will be held at the end of November for the master students. He invited the students to think about what would they like to create with standuino: music, lights or visual effects? (First spontaneous ideas)

 

In the second and last part of the session Isidora Krstic presented her research about the “Experiment 41” of Robert Boyle (1627-1691), an experiment on a bird in the air pump. In Boyle's times the self-evident truth of a scientific experiment was not questioned. Every kind of method was allowed for the sake of science and science was also shown. “Experiment 41” was played several times and has a public because it was spectacular for the time. Of course life and death had another relevance in that period in comparison to nowadays. But Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) criticized the experimental approach of Boyle questioning the need to experiment to obtain the scientific truth. If we analyze “Experiment 41”, affirms Isidora Krstic, we can see a lot of paradoxes. The experiment is not only about a bird in an air pump and the consecutive result but it is strictly correlated to the ethics, the values system, the expectations and the way of thinking of the society. Boyle's “Experiment 41” was a scientific controversy ante litteram that provoked, as the comments of the round-table session showed, a big interest also nowadays.

 

ROUNDTABLE
October 31, 2013, 9:30h
Location
Art & Science Studio