February 09, 2010
Bricolab, the workshop for the festival Afropixel 2010: a stage of Mobile A2K
From 16 to 24 February 2010 in Dakar the association Kër Thiossane will host Bricolab, a workshop by Jean Noël Montagné dedicated to the creation of interactive tools to be used in creative and educational processes.

The workshop in Dakar is the second stage of Mobile A2K, a development of the format of "pedagogical suitcase". The "pedagogical suitcase" is one of the three concepts developed during the meeting in Bellagio in October 2009.

The Senegalese association Kër Thiossane, a partner of lettera27, is a center devoted to art and multimedia technology, a place of exchange and research about the opportunities offered in educational and creative contexts by ICT.

The workshop Bricolab is part of the residency program in preparation for the festival Afropixel, an event organized by the association, in cooperation with other African and international institutions, and dedicated to the intertwining of art and technology in Africa.

The "pedagogical suitcases" created by artists during their residency will be presented in the exhibition in Dakar during the festival Afropixel, scheduled for the month of May, in concomitance with Dak'art, the Biennial of Contemporary African Art. The participants of Bricolab are African and Caribbean artists, selected through an open call, who will work together to create a series of prototypes and tools, using the open source hardware platform Arduino.

During eight days of collective work the artists will deal creatively with each other and work together to create interactive art projects. The workshop will also provide the opportunity to experience a professional training experience, acquire knowledge, and experience a "technological know-how”.

An important part of the workshop will be, in fact, an introduction to Arduino, an open source hardware platform that can be manipulated, customized and assembled by users. So, thanks to this tool, the participants will build with their own hands a number of "pedagogical suitcases", which contain interactive systems.

Jean Noël Montagné is an artist and creator of collaborative art projects dedicated to interactive art. In his works he uses real time interaction processes to trigger public debate on economic and environmental problems and on the conditions of the individual today. At the heart of the Mobile A2K workshop, these and other topics will be faced through the creative use of new technologies.



Photo: Matt Biddulph – (cc) Attribution-ShareAlike