Subtle Machines: Designing for Engagement and Response-Ability

We will build novel individual and collaborative extensions enabling engagement in dialogues and in structures of communication otherwise difficult due to social, political, technological, habitual, and/or unavowable circumstances. Students will develop individual and collective hypotheses, project plans, built apparatuses and systems, actions and performances. We will read and discuss excerpts from Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, D. W. Winnicott's Playing and Reality, and Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway. We will build with familiar and experimental electronic and other materials. Work may occasion collaboration with multiple departments at Brown as well as more broadly.