I am James Englander, native of Falls Church, Virginia and I’m studying Robotics Engineering because I always wanted to make a robot to do some of the more repetitive tasks in life for me. My first real inspiration for art was this quote from my middle school teacher:

 ”Robots are not truly as smart as humans until they can create art.” 

Art originally was not my favorite activity because I am very solution minded. In other words, I like to make things to solve problems and I thought for a long time that art does not solve problems. I found out I was very wrong after art solved one of my biggest problems ever: visualizing ideas. In the beginning stages of an idea, I have a hard time figuring out the form of the object. Sketching out my ideas helped bridge the gap from brainstorming to building the solution. This later evolved into testing other mediums through courses at WPI.

I took a windy road to get to this practicum with regards to the kinds of art classes. I started with essentials of art where I was inspired to try making comic style art pieces. From there, I took an art history class and a graphic design class before finishing up with the figure drawing class. Needles to say, I have dabbled in a few varieties of art at this point which illustrates my indecisiveness regarding my art medium preferences both digital and traditional. I will say that I enjoyed messing around with Adobe Illustrator in the graphic design class and creating a comic character I named Frank Forrester aka Pinstripe in essentials of art. However, My favorite piece was my self portrait for Figure Drawing because I broke my own high expectations of my drawing skills. On top of my artistic journey, I was learning more and more about programming and electronics.  

Through my major and general passions, I have written a lot of code and messed with few electronics. I have made a few games, notably MSP430 Hero, and Double-Slided, and written code for many robots. MSP430 Hero is a version of guitar hero written for Texas Instrument’s MSP430 development board.  Double-Slided is a puzzle game written in Java for PC. However, many of those projects did not allow for much creativity due to time constraints and amount of material to cover in the course. This led me to seek a practicum which would allow for more creatively while also blending the skillsets I have gained over the years. 

When I was looking for a practicum, I wanted to find something that could combine both my technological skills with my artistic skills and Light Art fit the bill. I am excited to see where the fusion of skills leads in creating this project.

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