1. Bioplastics

This atelier is set up as an Innovation Lab where new organic materials -bioplastics- will be studied and fabricated. Practical use of these vegetal and bacterially grown materials will be discussed on the basis of the case study the Guerilla Beehive. The atelier is directed by Anne Marie Maes, artist, beekeeper and herbalist.  The first phase of the atelier will focus on working with raw materials and recipes to create thin membranes and surfaces. In a second part, we will investigate how these materials can be supplemented through embedded electronics. An important part of the workshop will also be to think about the practical applications and implications of these bio-plastics or second skins. It is in this part that we will discuss the case study the Guerilla Beehive, and develop speculative future scenarios to save the disappearing honey bees.

The Guerilla Beehive is a project on the edge between art and science, focusing on issues of sustainability, more specifically the survival of the honeybee species. It is using new materials and new digital fabrication technologies, more specifically, sustainable bio-plastics.The Guerilla Beehive is a radically new beehive that can be placed in any kind of environment, including urban environments, offering a shelter to swarming bee colonies. The beehive is not designed for commercial honey exploitation, but it is intended to support pollination and biodiversity by the bees.  Moreover, the beehive is enhanced with non- intrusive technology to monitor the wellbeing of the colony and it can also be used as a sensing device to measure the ecological status of the environment. The project evokes the pressing issue why there is at the moment widespread colony collapse, not using scientific methods but using in order to raise public awareness and research drastically new materials and observation methods.

Bio: Anne Marie Maes is an artist and a researcher. Her work incorporates sculpture, photography, video, installation and public participation.  She creates projects that stimulate the development of a more sustainable world. Her research practice combines art and science with a strong interest for DIY technologies. Her installations and long term projects - such as the Transparent Beehive, Urban Corridors or the Politics of Change - use a range of biological, digital and traditional media, including live organisms. She makes use of technological mediation to search for new forms of communication with the natural world, to make the invisible visible. Anne Marie Maes is the founding director of the Urban Bee Lab and has for decades been a recognized leader pioneering art-science projects in Belgium, using highly original ways to bring out hidden structures in nature by constructing original technological methods to probe the living world and by translating that in artistic creations through sonification, visualization, sculptures, large-scale long-term installations, workshops, lectures and books. She has a strong international profile, having exhibited (amongst others) at Bozar in Brussels, Koç University Gallery in Istanbul, Borges Center in Buenos Aires, Bozar in Brussels, Arsenals Museum in Riga, Skolska Gallery in Prague, the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, the Designmuseum in Mons and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.  http://annemariemaes.net

2. HELGA, the wrath of forms

3. Creative Theatrical Writing

The workshop will begin with the idea of an experiment about the creation of stories through creativity. Participants become authors and actors in a play. The theatrical dialogue, however, will be a story of a specific nature. The "story" built in a scenic dialogue has a different linearity from the commonly written stories, plays or novels.  Conceiving a laboratory, a workshop, a factory of theatrical texts, usually starts with an idea. According to some opinions, the theatrical text is nothing but a dialogical articulation of an idea, a topic that has its own introduction, development and conclusion. Whilst, normally the person who conducts a work of this kind, proposes a topic and the parameters first and teaches how to develop and articulate a play. Then, in my opinion, building a theatrical dialogue which, considering the parameters we specified, tries to articulate itself not worrying about adhering to a topic, to a setting, or to the specific development of a theme, is much more complex. Which is how my work is clearly different from those mentioned earlier.  This won't be a seminar of improvisation.  Participants are not actors but authors / creators. They try to probe the possibilities of a dialogue to accept, among those proposed, the best ones for themselves and for the circumstances of the moment. Working to fix a process, participants experience the logic of an answer. They try to violate the anguish of the construction of new rules, though freer and freer and at times absurd, still playable and classified, new rules.  They are therefore asked to describe, in addition to the text, even the mechanisms and rules that they are following and taking. So to offer it as a model or for changing them in return.

Bio: Alex Cantarelli (Roma, 1970) filosofo, regista teatrale, coreografo e drammaturgo italiano. Si occupa di teatro, danza, musica e scrittura da circa ven'anni, come autore, direttore, performer ed insegnante. Wikipedia: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Cantarelli
Sito uff. www.alexcantarelli.com

Bio: Mila Vukomanovic is the Research Training Administrative Coordinator for ESSENCE (a Marie Curie ITN) based at the University of Edinburgh. She has a B.A (Double Major in English and History) from the University of Toronto, and an M.A in English Literature from the University of Manitoba. She has lived in Serbia, Canada, Australia, England, and Scotland, and is fluent in English, French, and Serbian.

4. The Essentialists

Bring your instruments and we will create a band! Basic equipment (sound amplification) will be provided. We'll practice a few songs and then perform at the final Summer School party on Friday evening. This atelier is quite open-ended, and intended to be fun to everyone - you don't have to be a musician to participate (though we will need a bunch of instruments to get something going), there are plenty of other roles in a band, like writing song lyrics, helping record tunes, giving feedback to the band, or simply being a devoted fan! We'll try to write some simple songs and play - also if you're a complete novice to music, we'll be happy to teach you some basics if you always wanted to know how that stuff works, you can always try to play along with your laptop!

Bio: Michael Rovatsos is Senior Lecturer at the School of Informatics of the  University of Edinburgh and Co-Ordinator of the ESSENCE network. His research is mostly on distributed AI, multiagent systems, and social computation and he has worked in these areas since 1999. When he doesn't work on AI, he likes to play mostly improvised music that ranges from cheesy to jazzy and pretty much everything in between.

5. Organic Animation

Biological forms have their own aesthetics which are appealing to the eye for its organic forms. Adding a dimension of movement brings in new excitements in unexpected ways. The idea of the workshop is to borrow the aesthetics and forms of biological and natural shapes of your own research as an inspiration to build short and simple storylines. However, the goal is not to animate your shapes literally, but to use these as a creative source by relaxing rational and logical constraints. The charm of animation is that it allows exploring alternatives possibilities in space and time, constrained only by imagination. You can give life to interesting shapes, behaving and interacting in peculiar ways.

In this atelier the participants will learn the basics of animating simple line drawings, by applying techniques of morphing, anticipation, loops, cels, zooms, etc. On each session, each of the participants will make some short animations of a few seconds, each focusing on a basic technique. There is no need for the participants to have previous expertise in drawing. Even the simplest forms like stick men or geometrical shapes come to life when conveyed with the dynamics of animation.

Bio: Al Teleki is a doomed existentialist who explores the interfaces between art and science, largely by addressing sociological issues of research itself. He produces video(-)installations that combine different techniques ranging from analogue (S8), animation, stop motion and digital non-linear editing. He is also an interviewer, poetry writer and performer, as well as a street artist carrying licit and illicit interventions. He often employs biological media and lab techniques and equipments to explore concepts and develop appealing aesthetics. He started studies in Media Art at the Minerva Academie in Groningen (NL) and later Art&Science in the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the Austrian Capital. He has participated in several collective exhibitions in London, Vienna, Brno and Belgrade. http://alteleki.worpress.com

6. Rugby

The goal of this atelier is to have fun learning the basic rules of rugby! During the atelier, we will focus on how to understand and play rugby, with special focus on attacking, passing and defending (without tackling). We will start with some warm-up exercises, then we will do to some specific exercises (each day we will be focused on a different topic) and we will end up playing rugby touch. The only requierement is to bring some sport clothes and want to enjoy the course! Previous experience is not necessary.

Bio: Miquel Cornudella graduated in Computer Engineering and took the MSc course of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He worked on several projects at UPF until he joined the Language Group at Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris in February 2014. He started to play rugby at the age of 11. He was a coach for the FC Barcelona rugby academy for seven years.