October 30-31, 2012: Camille Scherrer
Deadline: October 26, 2012
November 15-16, 2012: Yap Nam Weng
Deadline: November 13, 2012
December 1-2, 2012: Karina Smigla Bobisnki
Deadline: November 27, 2012
Applications are open for workshops with international artists working in the field of New Media Art organized by Toolkit Festival, in collaboration with the A plus A Slovenian Exhibition Center, for the upcoming of its third edition that will occur in Venice on May 9th-10th -11th, 2013.
These workshops, which will occur in the A plus A Slovenian Exhibition Center and that will last two days, represent an important formative opportunity, a moment of didactic exchange that is unique in its kind, where the observers will have the opportunity to encounter the artists and to discover closely their work.
The first workshop will be Tuesday 30th and Wednesday 31st October with Camille Scherrer (http://www.chipchip.ch/), a young Swiss designer of interactive installations, who graduated in 2008 at the University of Art and Design of Losanne in Visual Communication and has been awarded the Best European Design Diploma (Talent exhibition, Design huis, Eindhoven). Camille loves experimenting and playing with art and technology and has created a very personal universe inspired to the woods she grew up in, made by animals, cableways and old postcards. Her projects have been exhibited and reviewed at an international level at MoMa – New-York, Siggraph Japan, San José California Biennal, digital art festival of Seoul.
The second appointment has been scheduled for the 15/16th November 2012 with the artist Yap Weng Nam (http://wengnamyap.com), graphic designer from Kuala Lumpur, Malesia, who moved in Holland after some work experience in Barcelona and Prague. His work sees a wide range of medias: from classic paper to multimedia works that create a total fusion between graphic and sound. Prints with geometric patterns that placed on a record player produce sounds, mini booklets with elegant packaging’s manually assembled, screenprinted postcards, posters and postage stamps – his artworks that reflects his personal life. In these works the contemporary language mirrors the artist: the graphic allusions to oriental patterns mixed with Dutch neoplastic influences create an ensemble of shapes that convey purity and solemnity, with rigor and dynamism.
The 1st and the 2nd December will be the turn of Karina Smigla-Bobinski (http://www.smigla-bobinski.com/). Born in 1967 in Poland, she lives and works alternating Munich and Berlin. After graduating in visual arts and visual communication at the Academy of Fine Arts of Crocevia (Munich), she now works on projects that space from site-specific installations to interactive performances. She teaches at the department of Art and Design of the University of Applied Sciences of Asburg, Germany. Her artworks have been exhibited in more than thirty different countries in festivals, galleries and museums among which we can find the Biennale of Venice and the Biennale of Busan, in South Korea, the FILE Electronic Language International Festival of San Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, the VideoAKT Biennale of Berlin and LOOP – Video Art Fair of Barcelona.
The most famous of her projects is Ada, an interactive installation that transforms itself in a kinetic sculpture. It is an enormous plastic sphere filled with helium with attached to its surface pieces of charcoal so that the audience is stimulated to pick them up and use them to draw on the walls of the exhibitive space. Yet, every time that a participant tries to draw a precise figure the plastic sphere, due to physical laws, returns a different movement and therefore a different line, creating a generative artistic work.
During the two previous editions (Venice, March 2011 and May 2012) the Toolkit Festival, created by Martin Romeo and dedicated to interactive and multimedia art, has become one of the main appointments of the venetian cultural scene – an event with the capacity of engaging the whole city and its institutions. For this reason, strong from the public and critic success of the past years, the coordinators decided to try another step forward by increasing the frequency of the events, therefore improving the quality of what the Festival has to offer, inviting important artists and giving Venice the possibility to become once again a place where dialogue, exchange with the public and artistic research are considered of fundamental importance for the development of the city and of the people living in it.