Machine Project, in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, is an amazing tech art gallery and workshop space. I've attended many wonderful events there, including: building a blubber bot robotic blimp, my presentation on beekeeping, guitar and amp making, and spoon carving, a fake sailing ship in distress, an anything-you-want-deep-fried fry-b-cue, teaching kids how to steal cars, Picklefest 2008 and 2009, USB power supply hacking, a beautiful fake forest with a pancake breakfast and nature films about bears, a Menger sponge made from business cards, jam making with fallen fruit, a MIDI scrapyard challenge workshop, a first hand account of cuddling pandas in China, a build-your-own-noise-thing workshop, a graphic design for newbies workshop, how to extract stem cells from bovine bones, and grow a clump of tasty tissue, some spare ears, or a set of pig wings in a petri dish, building a network-attached storage out of old PCs, competitive cable untangling, finding medicinal herbs growing in sidewalk cracks, making the classic crank ghost animatronic Halloween project, quantum computing for beginners, a corn whiskey still demonstration, a grow your own skin class, a bake-off using homemade 100-watt light bulb ovens, and a sauerkraut making workshop, among others.
Beginning on February 8, Machine Project will be teaching a four-session course called Basic Electronics for Artists. I'm sure it will sell out quickly, so if you are interested sign up now. The course is $250 for nonmembers, and $225 for members.
Weekly Outline:
1: Tuesday Feb 8th @ 7-10pm. DC Basics. Voltage, current, resistance. Series and parallel circuits. Identifying common components. Building basic circuits from resistors, LEDs, switches, wires and batteries and how to (not) burn, smoke, or otherwise ruin them.
2: Thursday Feb 10th @ 7-10pm. AC Basics. Electromagnetism, induction, capacitance.
3: Tuesday Feb 15th @ 7-10pm. Semi-conductors, transistors, diodes. Potentiometers and other kinds of variable resistors. Voltage divider circuits.
4: Thursday Feb 17th @ 7-10pm. Integrated circuits. Timers, oscillators and amplifiers.
