Art and technology students fuse electricity and creativity in ‘Magneetocorpus’ exhibit

Not many people would want to tour an exhibit of final exams for a history test, but the art and technology department has finals projects worth seeing. While most students are typing papers and bubbling in Scantron sheets, art and technology students will be displaying finals that spin, turn, blink, buck and sing.

Magneetocorpus is the exhibit of final projects of all students in art and technology courses.

Exhibits like this are held at the end of every quarter under different names that Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs, a married couple, devise over dinner. They are both associate professors in the art and technology program at Ohio State.

It is a competitive "applied arts program" where students are trained to use high-tech media to create all forms of art. Elements in the program include animation, bioart, 3-D modeling, electronics, robotics, holography and more.

"Our classes always fill first, because everyone wants to learn how to express themselves artistically through technology," Rinaldo said.

While describing a student's final project, a mechanical bull and toaster combination, Rinaldo said, "It's a pretty silly thing, but in the process he's learning about mechanics, he's learning about electronics, he's learning about control, how to test something and engineer it."

Here are a few of the students and their soon-to-be-exhibited creations.

David Francus, a fifth-year in fine arts and biology, is building an electronic butterfly for his new media robotics class.

"The wings are made of custom-made circuit boards covered in LED, or light-emitting diode, lights, and there are different sensors built into the body of the fly that changes the patterns that are on the wings," Francus said. Each wing has 128 white LED lights, and six legs sprout from the fluorescent yellow body to support a miniature interactive light show.

The wing lights remain off until a person trips the motion sensor in the interactive electronic creature. There will also be multiple radio frequency tag sensors in blossom-shaped pieces of plastic, separate from the butterfly. RF tag sensors are radio frequency transmitters used for animal identification and touch-free credit cards and the like. Each blossom will have a different effect on the wings' lights. For example, "when you use a different blossom, it will change from checker board to zebra stripe," Francus said.

Joshua Penrose is a second-year graduate student pursuing a master's degree in the art and tech program.

His project is an "instrument" of infrared sensors. Eight infrared sensors are pointed at a 45 degree angle toward the floor, and mounted on the horizontal bar of a 3-foot-high, repurposed microphone stand. The interactive piece can be "played" by guests by waving hands and arms like a conductor in front of the sensors.

"When we think of electronic media, we think of things that are fixed like a DVD. … I like to think of it as sort of opening up the experience and … making the experience dependent on how the viewer interacts," Penrose said.

Marina Goldshteyn is a fourth-year in art and technology with a focus on video and motion graphics. Her final project for her digital image manipulation II class is a collage-like video. "It's compiled of found images and moving images … and it's about mustaches and the history of the mustache," Goldshteyn said. "Hopefully I can fit in the woman's mustache.

"I really like to play with humorous ideas, and I think art should be fun but have an underlying intriguing concept behind its humor," she said.

The underlying concept in her project tests the believability of narrators and statistics. "I'm kind of messing with the audience's view of trust. … How do you know if this stuff is true? Just because I'm saying this is history … is it actually real?"

Not-so-true graphs, blueprint and pie charts will be in the video, and the narrator will be a floating head speaking with a British accent, because a British accent is much more believable, Goldshteyn said.

Nick Bontrager is a graduate student in the art and tech program who typically focuses on installation sculpture. He is helping Rinaldo teach a robotics class this quarter, and he hopes to have two or three pieces in the show.

"I'm interested in taking a space and making an artwork that is related to that space, that kind of takes over and gives that space a new meaning or a new environment."

He got his undergraduate degree in photography from the University of Houston before coming to OSU. One of his pieces is inspired by a "child-like" fascination with snow, still a "mystery" to this Texas native. He studied a snowy fight scene from a 1960s Japanese film and isolated the movement of the snowflakes for his project. His piece is a 10-foot-wide contraption; small wooden dowel rods, ends painted white, are attached at 90 degree angles to a rotating horizontal cylindrical core. A camera is pointed toward the white ends of the rods and a TV in a separate room shows the illusion of the falling "snowflakes" in real time.

All these projects and at least 200 others will be in the Magneetocorpus exhibit.

There will be "all kinds of pretty outrageous pieces," Penrose said. "It's really great for everyone to see each other's work and play around. It's a lot of work to put one on each quarter, but it's a riot."

Magneetocorpus will be on display at Haskett Hall March 11 from 5 to 9 p.m. and March 12 from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. The exhibit is free.

To learn more about the art and technology program, visit artandtech.osu.edu.