Art & Beauty

Drawing with circuits – creating functional and artistic PCBs together

We are a professional electronics designer and a professional artist. We'd like to share our experience of integrating an artist into the design workflow for EMF's 2022 and 2024 event badges, how we ensured that form and function grew together, and how you might make a board so fancy it crashes your PCB vendor’s CAM software.
Circuit boards are increasingly being made to be seen. Whether they're personal or commercial, many projects show off their PCBs in an array of shapes, colours and sizes instead of hiding them in enclosures. While making an electronic design work correctly and making it look amazing are not conflicting goals, they do require very different skillsets. If you are not one of the rare people whose expertise spans both graphic and electronic design, it may feel very daunting to collaborate with someone who has a very different skillset. You must figure out what you don't know about each other's fields, what the other needs to know, and find the right language to bridge that divide. We will share our experience of working together as circuit designer and artist, and will talk about: - the possibilities and constraints of modern PCB technology as a medium for visual art - turning a functional electronic design into an artistic playground - our experience of communicating across fields of expertise, developing a common language and conveying essential ideas without getting in each other's way - some fantastic free software for art and electronic design - sample workflows for embellishing circuits - what PCB design software and manufacturers expect and how to get away with doing "weird" things - many examples of beautiful things we and others have made We hope this will inspire and encourage you to make your own beautiful collaborative designs a reality.

Additional information

Live Stream https://streaming.media.ccc.de/38c3/glitch
Type Talk
Language English

More sessions

12/27/24
Art & Beauty
Daichi Shimabukuro
Saal ZIGZAG
In a world dominated by digital communication and the drive toward linguistic unification, the simple act of 'typing' varies significantly across languages and writing systems. For European languages like English and German, typing typically involves a set of about 100 letters and symbols. In contrast, Japanese—and by extension, Okinawan—requires three distinct scripts: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Each of these adds layers of complexity and cultural depth to written expression. This ...
12/27/24
Art & Beauty
Saal ZIGZAG
We built an Ethical Hardware Kit with a PCB microcontroller made of wild clay retrieved from the forest in Austria and fired on a bonfire. Our conductive tracks use urban-mined silver and all components are re-used from old electronic devices. The microcontroller can compute different inputs and outputs and is totally open source.
12/27/24
Art & Beauty
Saal 1
UBERMORGEN infiltriert Kunst, Medien und digitale Monokulturen mit subversiver Affirmation. Wie Donald Trump auch, zerstören sie täglich ihr Geschäftsmodell, um daraus radikal neue Lösungen zu schaffen. Anhand von Projekten wie Vote-Auction, Google Will Eat Itself und PMC Wagner Arts dokumentieren sie ihre künstlerische Evolution im Never-Ending Now. Chaos ist ihre Methode, Kunst ihre Neue Ehrlichkeit, Klarheit ihre Waffe.
12/27/24
Art & Beauty
Saal GLITCH
Artist Andrei Molodkin held $45million of art hostage to free Julian Assange. He vowed to dissolve Picasso, Rembrandt, Warhol and other masterpieces in acid using a dead man’s switch device inside a 29-tonne Grade 5 Safe Room if Julian Assange was to die in prison. The talk will explain the process and methodology.
12/27/24
Art & Beauty
Artur Neufeld
Saal ZIGZAG
Modern 3D capture through Gaussian Splatting and human memory reveal parallel landscapes – where precise centers fade into probabilistic smears at the edges, and gaps hold as much meaning as detail. This is about the preservation of an ephemeral present in digital amber, an interrogation of how we reconstruct both digital and remembered spaces.
12/27/24
Art & Beauty
Joschua Knüppe
Saal GLITCH
The public image of dinosaurs is largely shaped by art. While paleontology is a dynamic and productive science, it is primarily through paleoart that our perception of prehistoric life takes form. By combining informed speculation with a deep understanding of anatomy, ecology, and geology, paleoartists continuously reimagine extinct organisms in innovative ways.
12/27/24
Art & Beauty
kathia
Saal ZIGZAG
Welchen Einfluss hat die Form der Dinge? Wie wirken wir durch die Gestaltung unseren kulturellen Praxen, Architekturen, Sprachen und Strukturen auf uns und die uns umgebende Zukunft ein? Und warum findet sich in zeitgenössischer Design Theorie ein Verb wie *Futuring*?