Vehicle #1: Petri Table (for Valentino Braitenberg) is an exploration of what happens when BEAM robotics meet a functional furniture object. It’s a coffee table that houses ten small solar-powered machines that twitch about when exposed to sunlight.

Click here to watch the Petri Table in action!

Pinewood Derby 2.0: A Two-Week, All-Levels Wood and Kinetic Electronics Workshop
May 26 – June 7, 2013

Do you need a reboot? This workshop is a mashup in which the folksy simplicity of the Boy Scouts’ pinewood derby will collide with the techno-sophistication of Arduino micro-controllers. The result will be simple wooden vehicles with potentially complex behaviors. They might be programmed to avoid obstacles, follow a flashlight, or draw interesting shapes on the floor. Technical information and demonstrations will include soldering, coding in the Arduino programming language, and the fundamentals of fabrication in wood.

Created for the exhibition Decoy at the Saskatchewan Craft Council’s Affinity Gallery, Dazzle Duck embodies a continuing exploration of three-dimensional scanning, direct manufacturing, and micro-controllers.

Click here to see Dazzle Duck in action!

Pinewood Derby 2.0 will introduce students to the amazing potential of integrating micro-controllers into physical objects. All students will begin by assembling Sparkfun’s ProtoSnap – Minibot. This kit includes everything you need to program an Arduino micro-controller and use it to control two motors in response to light sensors and other inputs. Assembling this kit will introduce the basics of soldering, assembling mechanical components, and programming in the Arduino environment. Once we have completed the stock kits, we will begin to customize our vehicles using the tools in the wood studio to create chassis, wheels, and other components. We will learn to customize both the physical arrangement of the vehicles, while also changing their programming allowing them to move over different terrain and respond to different variables in the environment. The course will culminate in a race through the woodworking studio. Suggested reading for the course: Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, Massimo Banzi’s Getting Started with Arduino, and Arduino.cc‘s Learning and Reference pages.

Matthew Hebert creates work that deals with technology and its effects on the environment and our sense of place, taking recognizable furniture forms and layering new forms of use and meaning onto them. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California-Berkeley and his Master of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts. He has taught at several schools including the University of Wisconsin – Madison, CalArts, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently Assistant Professor of Furniture at San Diego State University. Matthew Hebert has been working under the studio name eleet warez since the mid-90s. His work has been exhibited in venues including The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, The California Center for the Arts, The Chicago Cultural Center, and Core77 in New York. Additionally, he is a member of the collaborative public art team Unmanned Minerals, with Reno-based poet Jared Stanley and Los Angeles-based artist Gabie Strong.

You can click here to visit Matthew’s website, where you can see more of his work, including videos of ambulatory wooden sculptures like The Lawnmonster.

And you can click here to read Man in the Machines, a profile of Matthew Hebert by Kinsee Morlan for KCET San Diego.

Binary Drawers are a pair of interconnected drawers exploring ideas of negotiation and compromise through furniture. Closing the open drawer of one table opens the drawer of the other. The hydraulic link between the two drawers leaves no way for both to be closed at the same time.

Interested? Click here for more information about this and Penland’s other summer workshops in wood.

♫ Penland summer! Here it comes! Oh, oh, oh! ♫

“…In the early ’70s, I was woodcarving in my garage and I needed tools that I couldn’t afford, so I took a class at a local high school to forge tools . . . and I just fell in love with the forge. Forged iron has a texture and a presence that is much richer than any other from of metal.

“When I started being interested in blacksmithing, there were, across the country, an entire generation who came to it on their own and then all of a sudden discovered each other. There were a group of us who said, ‘If we hang onto this long enough, we’re going to go through a renaissance the same way that glass and pottery had.’ Two hundred years ago, probably one person in every 50 was a blacksmith. They were working with forge and anvil in 1900. By 1920 the anvil and the forge were full of dust and cobwebs. Blacksmithing is undergoing an enormous resurgence. There are many, many more blacksmiths now than when I started.

Toby Hickman, “Cloyn Fire Tools and Stand,” mild steel, 38 x 11 x 7 in.

“To me, it’s the physical act. Artistic development, business understanding–all that stuff has been an adaptation to allow me to continue to hit hot steel. It’s the thing that makes me feel good. It’s the feeling of the impact, swinging something heavy and hitting something that yields to that–and yields to it in a way that you intended it to. Just bashing around on hot steel can get to be too much work, but if you actually see something forming under hand, there is an enormous emotional reward.

Toby Hickman, “Cape Buffalo Fire Tool Finials,” mild steel, 8 x 4 in.

“I pride myself in being able to work in a number of different styles. I don’t know that I have a style any more, other than the fact that I like really to form the metal. I don’t want people to know what piece of metal I started with.”

- Toby Hickman, quoted in Iron Man: Blacksmith Toby Hickman keeps the anvil and hammer in good use by Sara Bir, in the August 1-7, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

Toby Hickman, “Snake Andiron,” mild steel, 16 x 10 x 18 in.

Advanced Power Hammer Skills
May 26 – June 7, 2013, in the iron studio:

This class will teach power hammer skills, including hit-turn, use of stop blocks to specific dimension, shouldering for abrupt change of section, and upsetting to increase cross section. Students will forge a pair of box-jaw tongs and the hand tools needed to forge them. We will forge, harden, and temper hand-held hot cuts, sets and punches, and open and closed dies.

This is an intermediate/advanced level workshop. Please include with your application a résume, a one-page letter telling why you’d like to take the class, and five printed images of your work.

Toby Hickman is a studio blacksmith and the owner/operator of Lost Coast Forge in Fort Briggs, California. He was the 2012 recipient of ABANA’s Alex Bealer Award for lifetime service to blacksmithing. He is a founding member and two-time president of the California Blacksmith Association, and a  former board member of ABANA. Toby has been forging on self-contained pneumatic hammers since 1981 when he bought his first Nazel 2B hammer.

Click here to watch Toby Hickman in action!

Toby Hickman, “Wrap Torchere,” mild steel, polychrome lacquer finish, 78 x 13 x 8 in. and “Kelp Torchere,” mild steel, polychrome lacquer finish, 78 x 15 x 15 in.

Interested? Click here for more information and registration for this and Penland’s other summer workshops.

♫ Penland summer! Here it comes! Oh, oh, oh! ♫