Saturday, September 27, 2025 at 12:00 PM to Saturday, September 27, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Brain Dead Studios, Los Angeles
Transform a disposable greeting-card module into a handcrafted electronic instrument with its own voice and character. In this beginner-friendly workshop, Dogbotic Labs will guide you through hacking an old sound chip—the same kind once used in unsettling stuffed animals and vending machines—to create your very own digital sampler. We’ll cover the basics of wiring, triggering, and bending these chips so they can play back sound bites, loops, and noise bursts at your command. You’ll learn how to add controls like pitch sliders, light sensors, and buttons to mangle and reshape your samples. By the end, you’ll walk away with a custom-built sampler prototype that can spit out warped greetings, haunted vending machine songs, or glitched-out beats. We’ll tune them together in class to form a one-of-a-kind sonic collage—and then you’ll take yours home to annoy and delight your friends, neighbors, and unsuspecting pets. All parts are included, no prior circuitry experience or musical ability needed! You’ll be learning with: Kirk Pearson (Dogbotic founder, creative director), a composer and multimedia artist based in Berkeley, CA. A graduate of Oberlin College and Conservatory, Kirk has written music, built installations, and designed experiences for the New Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, Museum für Kommunikation Bern, and for hundreds of films, stage productions, and new media projects. In 2017, Kirk was named a recipient of the Thomas Watson Fellowship, through which they spent a year traveling the world composing works for experimental instruments. They cut their sandwiches diagonally. Sean Russell Hallowell (Dogbotic partner, technical director), a composer and video artist from San Francisco. His time-based art synthesizes experimental techniques developed from hand-built circuitry with a cosmic perspective on the origins of music in number and periodicity. Concert works and audiovisual installations of his have been showcased at festivals and galleries across the US as well as in Mexico, Chile, South Korea, Japan, the UK, Belgium, Croatia, and Iceland. About Dogbotic: Dogbotic is a Bay-area based collective that teaches unconventional art classes as a means to promote creativity, discourage mindless consumerism, and engage in conversations about how to use our art to make the world more equitable. Our instructors love teaching artists how to engineer, and convincing folks how straightforward a lot of seemingly “difficult” concepts are. We hope to be a space free of judgement that fosters genuine collaboration and curiosity and an appreciation for the weird and wonderful. Learn more at dogbotic.com