Workshop Statement

With the Weird/Wonderful Fair we want to direct our attention to openness, flow and co-creation. We invite the local residents of Istanbul to explore with us in a mixture of interactive workshop, intervention and collective art piece. The Fair attempts to transgress the conference’s boundaries and incorporate the city’s public space, transforming the streets of Istanbul into an open space classroom. Instead of the conventional teacher-student approach which still dominates our educational systems, we propose a mobile peer-teaching format, a more subversive structure where we can use simple DIY projects to facilitate insights. Armed with these educational project kits, we will share knowledge with anyone in exchange for their spare time. We will bring invisible ink, simple robots and other surprising objects to build and understand. We will move through the city ‘selling’ these experiences like street vendors. Once you have completed a session with us, you will be invited to help us continue teaching, in a process we hope will help us cross boundaries of language and preconceptions. By accentuating the social and fluctuating aspects of knowledge production and exchange, the Fair embodies an attitude of “learning by making” and “learning by playing”. Our aim is to facilitate a series of moments where meeting and making together allows us to explore the larger unknown. Each daily journey will have four planned stops: Taksim Myd (1), the harbor quay in front of Istanbul Modern (2), the sidewalk of the Puente Galata bridge (3), and the Spice Bazaar (4).

• Anne Nigten (PhD) is the director of The Patching Zone, a praxis laboratory where Master, PhD students and professionals work together on meaningful creative content. Prior to her current position Nigten was the manager of V2_Lab, the aRt&D department of V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Nigten is lecturing on research and development in the interdisciplinary field from an art perspective. She is adviser for several media art and science initiatives in Europe, board member of Noordkaap foundation and Impakt foundation, The Netherlands. The Weird/Wonderful Fair originated in the Patching Zone project called Digital Art Lab. The following Patching Zone members were actively involved in the Digital Art Lab project which inspired the development of this workshop: Emöke Bada, Kristina Andersen, Loes Bogers, Inge Ploum and Berit Janssen. patchingzone.net
• Kristina Andersen is mentor at the Patching Zone and a maker and researcher based at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam. She works with electronics and games to create unusual objects and experiences. She holds an MA in Design, an M.Sc in Virtual Environments, and was a research fellow at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. She has taught and mentored at institutions like DasArts, Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academie and hosted numerous informal workshops in strange locations. tinything.com
• Loes Bogers (NL) is a media artist who recently graduated with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London where she obtained an MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice. She focuses her research on shared experiences of urban spaces through memory, sound and movement/dance. Her works aim to structurally intervene in the everyday media ecologies we inhabit by distorting or enhancing our experience of our surroundings.  loesbogers.com
• Emoke Majohunbo Bada (HU/NGR) is a student at the Intermedia Faculty of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, in Budapest. She has worked in various media, both digital and analogue, experimenting with the boundaries between different modes of expression. The common factor in her works is the importance of the idea, the concept behind a piece of art. She is fascinated with the world of stop motion animation. emoke.org
• Inge Ploum (NL) is a media philosopher and video artist currently living in Rotterdam. She studied New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and graduated cum laude (bachelor and master) in September 2009. Her work connects mediated expressions, historical developments of technology and media philosophy. She aims to understand the societal and social impacts of digital media, and mediated subjectivity in particular. Topics of interest: ‘virtuality and affectivity’, ’the antimony: mind versus body’ and ‘mediated myths of past and future’.  ingeploum.net
• Berit Janssen (DE) studied Systematic Musicology at the University of Hamburg and Electroacoustic Composition at the Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. She graduated with distinction with an MA in Systematic Musicology in 2009. She is a researcher and composer interested in the acoustic perception of space, and has held presentations on reverberation on multiple conferences. Berit has been working at STEIM (NL) since 2009 as a software developer and researcher. Since 2010 she also works part time for the Patching Zone, where she is involved with the development of workshops on synthesizer building and interactive sound design.