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Engineering Art

This past weekend, Baltimore once again hosted the annual Artscape Festival, the self-professed largest free art festival in America. It’s an amazing festival, with 3 days packed full of more art than you can shake a stick at. A few Key Techers, including myself, were in attendance and got to experiment with the different ways that art was being expressed through science and engineering.

Between performance, theatre, film, paintings and sculptures, the average attendee is hard pressed to not find some type of art that connects with them. This year, for the first time, Artscape included an area called Betascape, a geek/nerd/DIY-enthusiastic gathering full of home built robots, hacked circuitry to compose music and power tool races. You could even listen to the activity of ants in an ant farm by way of a few infrared LEDs and photodetectors.

One of the really interesting exhibits was an electronic marionette of a wizard. Click the first video to see the wizard’s song and dance, and then click on the second video to see the set of servo motors and circuitry that make it all work. It goes to prove that there’s no reason engineering can’t be a form of art when enough creativity is applied.

Brian Murphy


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