About Brent
Brent Wettlaufer is an amateur and professional transmuter, dependent wholly upon context. He, like most, is a wearer of some Hats (which is capitalized here to denote the heuristic classification of varying skillsets applied to delineate how I spend portions of my day, vis à vis the term "work".) He likes to play with the innumerable elements that make up this world, and to show how joyful that can be.
Photographer Hat, Engage!
My Grandma was our family photographer growing up - her old Canons were sacred black boxes that I've always found fascinating. We lived on a farm that was across from a swamp and a couple hundred meters away from any other human beings, so you'd get to know your subjects well: The stalwart garden spider casting its daily net; Grandpa's blue pickup camouflaged with bowls of dust tossed up from dirt and gravel roads; the geometric brilliance of a flat plane of corn etching endless rows of shadow against the rising sun. These are the elements that have trained my eye for photography.
After University I rekindled my affection for photography and have been shooting since 2009. I shoot street, travel, events, and some portraiture. I've worked with THEMUSEUM, Sustainable Waterloo Region, Nerd Nite KW, Wilfrid Laurier University, and HackerNest KW among other clients. My images have also been shown in the Kitchener Chronicle, CBC KW and the Waterloo Region Vital Signs report in 2013 and 2014, along with art shows such as 8x10 EXPOSE POTENTIAL, FLASH WR in 2015, and Inside/Out at the Summer Lights Festival in 2016. Most recently, my work was shown at THEMUSEUM in partnership with the Collaborative Solutions to Inequitable Urban Change in Canadian Cities initiative, headed by Dr. Karla Boluk at the University of Waterloo.
If you see me out in the wilderness with my gear, I will probably smile and tell you not to worry about me being here, and for you to be yourself.
Maker Hat, Engage!
I self-identify as a Maker, though have been deemed a Metamaker by the incomparable Darin White over at MakeBright. The Kitchener-Waterloo community identifies me as a Maker primarily because I helped build a space at THEMUSEUM called The Underground Studio. I'm currently at Inksmith helping build robots, along with the pedagogy around why we should be teaching robotics to young learners.
I work with electronics platforms such as Arduino, Micro:bit, and other microcontrollers, structural materials such as wood, cardboard, and PVC, and the precepts of Constructionism; this is all incongruous with my Physics background from the University of Waterloo and has totally stretched my academic repertoire into a putty of ideas shaped by a weird thought machine.
I'm currently interested in robotics education, creating large-scale geometric games using NeoPixels, design thinking, computational thinking, learning how to sew, and any venture that ignites that little spark that we all have that we label imagination.
