Faculty Students, Alumni Teachers

Once the first fork came out of the printer, there was no turning back. That was last September, when 10 Bennington faculty members and technicians came together with their teacher—a Bennington alumnus who had formerly been the student of three of these faculty—to learn how to design and produce 3-D objects with the help of a MakerBot, a desktop machine that “prints” in three dimensions. One of the class’s earliest assignments was to design and print a fork.

“I had no control whatsoever,” laughed Guy Snover ’06 of the 14-week course he taught to an eclectic group that included Barry Bartlett, ceramics; Andrew Cencini, computing; Tim Clark, digital arts technician; Michael Giannitti, drama/dance; Jon Isherwood, sculpture; Robert Ransick, digital arts; Sue Rees, media arts/ design; Tim Schroeder, geology; Donald Sherefkin, architecture; and Jon Umphlett, interdisciplinary technician. Out of that fertile chaos sprang a rich collaborative environment in which faculty and staff shared ideas and experimented freely.

The class, focusing on 3-D modeling software Rhinoceros—Rhino for short—and algorithm editor Grasshopper, was organized by Isherwood and Ransick, who invited Snover, himself a sculptor and an engineer, to teach it during the Fall 2012 term. From the start, the idea was to materialize digital designs.

Some of the most surprising work was the hardest to picture. For instance, Schroeder used sonar-generated topography data of a large massif beneath the Atlantic Ocean to create a model in Rhino. With the MakerBot, Schroeder was able to create a physical model of this difficult-to-visualize, subsurface, geologic structure—and to look at it for the first time—something that literally cannot be observed directly since it is below the zone that light penetrates through seawater.

This class is the first phase of the Open Art and Technology Initiative, supported by a three-year $300,000 grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. The initiative aims to create opportunities for Bennington’s faculty to collaboratively develop curriculum that uses new technology, 

with the support of visiting artist-technologists who will teach and train faculty—sometimes together with students—in an open environment of artistic and intellectual exchange. It has created a kind of play space for faculty to explore new technologies, get comfortable with them, and integrate them into their own work and teaching without ever leaving campus.

“For me, it was especially interesting to sit down with the arts faculty every week and see how they approach problems, which is very different from how scientists think,” said Schroeder. “While we were moving along, I was interested in learning the nuts and bolts of how the software worked, and the artists were interested in what sort of forms they could make. When I looked around the room, I might have been farther along with the lesson, but the artists had much more interesting and attractive things on their screens.”

And yet Schroeder’s work sparked equal interest from the artists. “I was really intrigued by his work modeling the ocean floor area he had been studying,” said Giannitti. “It showed the flexibility and adaptability of Rhino at a completely different order of magnitude and in a completely different kind of application.”

Isherwood and Ransick are now developing their own class around what they learned titled Object Oriented: Creating and Making with Technology, which they will offer to Bennington students this fall. And four additional pairs of faculty members will engage in a similar sequence of a learning term, followed by a development term, and ending in a teaching term.

Nick Brooke, who teaches sound and music, and Kate Dollenmayer, who teaches video launched their learning term this past spring. In it, visiting artist-technologist Adam Rokhsar taught a mix of faculty, students, and staff to use Max, a popular visual programming language that allows artists to use cameras, microphones, iPhones, and other sensors to create interactive, responsive art. The Max programming language just happens to be the creation of David Zicarelli ’83 who dropped in on the class in April to offer insider insights.