A new semester begins today, and we have lots to look forward to in the STS program (and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences department more broadly) this fall!
Here are some upcoming events:
Opening reception for Sea to Stone: A Group Exhibition Featuring Cretaceous Era Clay in the Apex Gallery on August 28th, from 4:30 to 6 pm.
Visiting STS Speaker Dr. Gwen Ottinger will speak on campus (11 am) and at Hay Camp Brewing (6 pm) as part of the STEAM Cafe series on Tuesday, September 15th.
Zinemaking events will be taking place both on- and off-campus. On campus, look for us in the Classroom Building from 9-2:30(ish) on Wednesday, September 23rd. Off campus, we have events scheduled at the Rapid City Public Library on Sunday, September 20th, and Saturday, October 17th, with the possibility of more to come!
These zinemaking events help build up to our third annual Zinefest, scheduled for Monday, December 7th, in the Apex Gallery.
Last but not least, the music program is putting on multiple concerts, all well worth attending!
Fantasy & Fright: Friday, October 23rd, at 7 pm (Music Center)
Fall Orchestra & Honors Brass Concert: Friday, November 13th, at 7 pm (Music Center)
Fall Band Concert: Friday, November 20th, at 7 pm (Music Center)
Holiday Cathedral Concerts: Friday, December 4th, at 7 pm, and Saturday, December 5th, at 2 pm. (Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cathedral)
Follow us here and on Instagram to get more details about these events and find out about any new events that pop up!
This semester, we both asked students in our classes (Introduction to Humanities and Environmental Literature & Culture) to create commonplace books. We found this to be a successful way to get students thinking about core ideas from class and to encourage creative activity. Read on for more information about commonplace books, how we used them, and how students responded!
What Are Commonplace Books?
Commonplace books have a long history – extending as far back as people have had easy access to paper and writing utensils – and are a way of organizing information for yourself. They can overlap with journals or diaries, but they’re also for classifying and indexing information to find later, and they have taken various shapes over time as they have served different purposes for different groups of people. Religious leaders’ commonplace books in the 17th century, for instance, look and function differently than young ladies’ commonplace books in the 19th. Adam Smyth provides a pretty standard definition of them: “the commonplace book presents a series of thematic headings under which aphorisms are distributed, gathered from reading, or, more rarely, from conversation, and deemed in some way useful or exemplary” (91).
Page from a commonplace book by author Charles Lamb (1775-1834). Public domain.
However, Smyth also notes that actual commonplace books only sometimes followed this description. He writes,
The experience of reading manuscript commonplace books is often an experience of baffled delight – delight at pages so crammed with text that annotations spill over the binding and covers; at devotional aphorisms jostling with bawdy epigrams and recipes . . . ; at scraps of printed pages glued into the manuscript; at prose merging with verse merging with financial accounts merging with illustrations; at blank pages, and gaps; at entire printed books bound into the centre of manuscripts; at the construction of a single manuscript out of many different sized pages; at the recycling of old, often medieval texts in the binding of manuscripts; at texts that simultaneously ‘begin’ from various points within their pages and proceed in various directions, so that it becomes meaningless to talk of a front or back, a beginning or an end. (90-91)
Smyth goes on to describe this as an “eclecticism of inclusions” and “rampantly inventive materialism” (91), descriptions which beautifully highlight the flexibility and openness of commonplace books and their inherently physical nature. Both of these elements are closely tied to goals of humanities classrooms that emphasize practicing and learning about a wide range of modes of expression (e.g., film, art, literature, philosophy) and that value creators’ and students’ experiences of the world.
Last summer, Washington, D.C.-based artist Chris Combs swapped his urban studio at the Otis Street Arts Project for one that required a 10-minute open-cage elevator ride, personal protective equipment, and a brass tag etched with his name, indicating his presence nearly a mile underground.
The show will feature interactive, time-based sculptures crafted from found objects, metal, wood and other industrial materials—many of them salvaged during Combs’ time at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead. By weaving discarded materials into his work, he aims to echo the layered history of the Homestake Mine and its evolution into a world-class underground laboratory, a dual legacy that drew him to apply for the SURF AiR program.
“I wanted to see firsthand the machinery of particle physics, and the human ‘machinery’ that constructs and maintains it nearly a mile underground in a dusty former gold mine with flood-marked walls,” Comb said. “In my art, I think a lot about how technologies have changed our world, and Homestake/SURF is two rounds of that: first, the transformation of a mountain into 370 miles of tunnels and drifts, and then the transformation of that mine into a container for globe-spanning experiments. The idea of astrophysics occurring a mile underground was very intriguing.”
Photo credit: Stephen Kenny, SURF
Combs creates his pieces with the goal of having audience interaction. “I am lucky to get to make interactive artworks, where pushing a button or inserting a metal ball makes something happen,” he said. “At least for me, actively participating helps me remember it later. This extra little conversation between an artwork and its viewer also offers a challenge and a reward: do you dare to touch the thing? If so, here is an unexpected result. I hope that my artworks reward your curiosity.”
Last week, Matt Whitehead and I gave a presentation about the relationship between poetry and science for National Poetry Month as part of the STEAM Cafe series at Hay Camp Brewing. If you were not able to attend, this is a brief version of what we presented.
As members of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences department, Matt and I (as Art and English faculty, respectively) spend a lot of time thinking about how to get students thinking creatively and engaging in creative projects. Given our work with the Science, Technology, & Society degree, we also work with connections between humanities/arts and science/technology, and we encourage our students to see creativity as something that they don’t do only in our classes but that is a part of their scientific and engineering work, too.
Our core question grows out of this work: What does poetry have to do with science?
The two might seem fundamentally dissimilar, belonging to different realms, but both offer opportunities to look carefully, communicate observations, make connections, and understand the world more fully – piece by piece, experience by experience.
“[Zines] are practices of ‘poetic world-making’—poetic not in the sense of a poem on the page (although they can be this too), but in the sense of poesis: the process of creating something that did not exist before.” – Gwen Allen
The classes I teach create communities. Students get to know each other as they learn the course material, and they share ideas and work with each other. This is a form of world-making, even if temporary, and I love this about my classes. But I don’t want the connections and sharing to stop at the classroom door or to be forgotten when the semester ends. The goal is for my students to connect what they’re learning in class with the rest of the world, to share what they’ve learned with others, to hear what others have learned, and to join and build other communities.
Finding ways to do this can be challenging, but it’s not impossible.
This semester, as a way for students to connect across classes and share work with broader audiences, a few of us in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences department (myself, Matt Whitehead, Evan Thomas, Erica Haugtvedt, and Mary Witlacil) put on a series of zinemaking events that culminated in a Zinefest in the Apex Gallery on December 4th. Zinefest was an all-day come-and-go event that displayed the zines students made in classes (and, in a few cases, just for fun!), provided some examples of interesting zines made by others, and gave visitors a chance to make their own zines. (If you missed it this year, watch out for another event next year!)
This event let students share some of what they have learned this semester, giving them a broader audience, and it also connected them to students in other classes and to the audiences who came to Zinefest. While I did not count the number of visitors during Zinefest, the gallery filled several times and was rarely empty. Some people walked through relatively quickly and took in only a few zines; others stayed for quite a while, standing and reading multiple zines before finally deciding on some they wanted to keep. One student – who will remain nameless for obvious reasons – wrote in a reflection afterward, “I spent almost 2 hours there and accidentally missed class, so I would say I had a good time.” Although I would (of course) never encourage a student to miss class, this indicates that Zinefest offered this student something meaningful.
Because most students were asked to bring multiple copies of their zines, visitors could take a copy of one if they were particularly interested in its ideas or really loved it. Hopefully, they will re-read any zines they took, remember the event, and maybe even be inspired to make their own! Leaving with a material artifact helps the experience and community created through this event extend past Zinefest itself.
Student zines on display with an invitation to take a zine.
As an event, Zinefest promoted connections and community; as a practice, making zines (even without an event like Zinefest) provides us all with an opportunity to create something new – to engage in world-making – and to share that something with others, without requiring elaborate technology or infrastructure, refined skills, or many resources. Anyone can make a zine, and that’s what’s so beautiful about them.
This semester, I am teaching a section of Connections: Humanities & Technology (HUM 200), which is one of our core STS courses as well as a general education course that students from across the university take to fulfill their humanities requirement. There are many ways to teach this course to get students to think more critically and more deeply about the relationships between the humanities and various technologies, and this particular semester’s class begins with a few weeks exploring printing technologies.
What better way to understand printing technologies than to try them out?
To incorporate a hands-on approach to printing in the class, I worked with our art professor, Matt Whitehead, to prepare an activity for students in the art room. We wanted to give students a chance to work with printing presses in a couple of different ways, to try using a typewriter and a Leroy lettering set, and to check out some old toy moveable type presses. These toy presses date from the 1940s and are no longer totally functional, so they were more on display than for use, but they still allowed students to get a better sense of what a moveable type printing press is like on a small scale.
A mini printing press from the Open Press Project, with students working in the background.
After a brief introduction to some basic printing techniques and explanation of what was available, students were given the freedom to explore these technologies in whatever order they wished. Some made an effort to try everything and even combined elements (the printing press with text from the typewriter or lettering set, for instance); some really focused in on one technology or technique and tried it multiple times or in multiple ways.
Frey speaking about his piece “Minesweeper World Map” (2018).
While here, Frey also visited Matt Whitehead’s Drawing class and worked with students on a poster creation project. In preparation for his visit, the class toured his show in the Apex Gallery and discussed the work and how it fit within the class’s idea of “the grid.” For the workshop, Frey started by discussing his take on the grid, which he sees as being all around us. He shared images that he took in his hotel that morning to help illustrate this. In his artwork he examines various ideas but is often looking for ways to challenge our understanding of the grid, while still working within it.
Asked to design posters for invented events and issues (using Nathaniel Russell’s fake flyer assignment described here), students invented lost animal posters with a twist, public service announcements about wearing sunscreen, warnings about birds, and much more. Many posters used similar design techniques even when their content was wildly different, illustrating how specific kinds of media (like informational posters) come with formal expectations that shape their content and presentation and connecting to Frey’s work in its focus on the idea of disrupting the social grid.
Elizabeth Benzmiller is a senior in the Science, Technology, and Society: Policy & Law Major. Throughout her time as a student at South Dakota Mines, she studied abroad in Limerick, Ireland, participated and held leadership roles in student organizations, and interned at the South Dakota Legislature and Raven Industries/Viaflex, Inc.
I was raised by two polar opposite parents. One chose a STEM career, worked in healthcare and laboratories, and was a very analytical and logical thinker. The other was a professional artist, singer, ballroom dance instructor, writer, and more. Growing up, I was able to see first hand how a STEM professional and an artist communicate and view the world very differently! One parent was a logical, straight to the point teacher who learned from a textbook and lectures, while the other was a creative, adventurous, empath who learned through experiences in their life.
This is my family in Italy, while we were visiting my sister while she performed in an opera. She did this before she graduated college with a degree in Computer Science and Data Analytics. From left to right, Sonya (older sister), Elizabeth (myself), Vincent (younger brother), James (father), and TracieLea (mother).
I was taught the importance of the arts and STEM from a young age and told I didn’t need to choose between the fields. From a young age, I was playing instruments, singing in proper form, reading like a true bookworm, and looking for any opportunity to get crafty and creative. We would have Craft Thursdays and Field Trip Fridays, exploring museums and historical centers, trying new things, and seeing the world from a new perspective each week. At the same time, I was encouraged to ask questions, research the world around me, explore nature and get my hands dirty. I could build rockets, play with Legos, and learn how to use a microscope. I could travel the world and see new sights, cultures, and experience new things.
Every day, I was encouraged to explore my passions and be a lifelong learner. I didn’t have to choose between the Arts and STEM, and I was a more well-rounded individual because I could do both. I eventually decided to study in a STEM-field, but I never wanted to lose my grasp on influences that the arts had on me and I wanted to explore their interactions with the scientific community. This led me to my senior capstone project researching the influence and impact that arts-based instruction has on engineering and STEM undergraduate students.
Matthew Whitehead is the Director of the Apex Gallery and a Lecturer who teaches Art and Art History classes in the Humanities department.
What’s your area of expertise? What do you primarily research and/or teach? And what drew you to this field?
I am an artist. I appropriate images and visual experiences from my surroundings and use them as inspiration for abstractions, mostly drawings, paintings, and collages. I work intuitively, paying close attention to composition and craft. My interest in the arts and the effect it has had on my life pushed me to pursue a career in education. I have taught painting, drawing, photography, illustration, design, graphic design, ceramics, stained glass, sculpture, art history, and foundational arts to students of all ages.
The arts have always been an important part of my life. I come from a family of artists and creatives. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was a renowned potter, painter, and art professor, and my grandmother was a social worker who now spends her time making traditional braided rugs and hand stitching quilts. My mother is a costume designer and art educator by trade but is also an actress and choir singer. My uncle is a potter, and my aunts are also artists of one kind or another. My grandmother on my Dad’s side was a trained aerial performer and painter. My dad was an actor, then a lawyer, and now he’s back to acting again. Given our family background, my siblings and I had no choice but to go into creative fields. My oldest brother is an actor, director, producer, filmmaker, and a professor of acting while my sister is an artist and landscape architect. Becoming an artist always felt like a natural fit.
I often teach a general education Humanities course (HUM 200, officially titled Connections: Humanities and Technology) on the topic of “Automatic Art.” As a Humanities class, we study representative elements from the entire range of arts and letters:
we study the Hockney-Falco hypothesis that primitive optical cameras were used in the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age;
Those are representative examples of the coursework – but what is “Automatic Art”? The term doesn’t actually have much reality outside of my course. (Frustrated students will often turn to the surrealist technique of Automatic Writing, which does exist, but has little bearing on the collection of objects we study.) I like to tell students that “automatic art” is equivalent to “taking the human out of art,” but what does that actually mean?
The Novum 