We had a short check in with Tega this morning and then we got some studio time before Taeyoon’s class. I spent pretty much all of my studio time doing the readings for the CTOT class tomorrow, they were quite long this week but definitely interesting.

Taeyoon continued teaching us some more circuits stuff after lunch. We learned how to make an XOR logic gate, and then how to use an integrated circuit chip that was full of nand gates and looked like this:

This chip lets you use nand gates to create a half adder! This means that you can add very simple binary numbers:

0 + 0 = 0 is 0 + 0 = 00
0 + 1 = 0 is 0 + 1 = 01
1 + 0 = 1 is 1 + 0 = 01
1 + 1 = 10 is 1 + 1 = 10

We can see that the least significant digit resembles the output for an XOR gate and the second (or leftmost digit) resembles the output for an AND gate. By combining these two logic gates, we can create a half adder that looks like this:

We also spent some time creating AND, OR, NOR, and XOR gates using only the chip with NANDS:

After circuits class, David Horvitz came to speak for an artist talk. He’s a super chill guy and his work is very playful. I think my favorite piece he talked about was called ‘Public Access’. ‘Public Access’ included taking a road trip up the west coast and taking a picture of himself at all of the public access beaches. He took the photo so that only his back is showing. When he was done with the road trip, he went to the wikipedia pages for each location he visited and inserted the picture he took on the beach of himself into the article. Eventually Wikipedia found out what he was doing and ended up banning him from Wikipedia. He also focuses a lot of his work on the concept of time. One example is a project in which he sailed to the line where the pacific time zone ends and took water from the time zone border. He then recreated the time zone border in a few galleries. Overall, pretty interesting and hilarious stuff!

We then ended the day with a family dinner. Franc cooked some spanish omelettes for everyone which were AMAZING. We then had a little mini surprise celebration for his birthday coming up! Happy Birthday Franc!!!!