Erik Brunvand featured speaker in TEDx Salt Lake City this fall
July 16, 2015
Erik is excited to be one of the speakers at the TEDx Salt Lake City event this fall – September 19th at Kingsbury Hall.
The theme of this year’s event is "Upcycling." he’ll be talking about upcycling old toys to turn them into weird-sounding electronic "musical" instruments. This is something called "circuit bending" and it involves modifying (bending) a toy’s circuits to make it into something else.
The "big idea" is that in our modern world people should have a basic knowledge of technology – it’s a fundamental skill for the 21st century. One way to get a feel for technology is to mess with it, play with it, and learn enough to feel like you can take a noise-making kid’s toy apart and make it do something different than it was intended to do. And, as a bonus, this is a LOT of fun!
You might recognize this as also relating to the theme of his University Professorship project and class. His undergraduate general education class developed as part of the Professorship is what inspired this talk (CS/UGS 2050 Making Noise: Sound Art and Digital Media ). The point of this course is that technological fluency should be a part of the general education curriculum!