Posts tagged workshop

Myanmar’s military goes to ‘democracy school’ with new civilian MPs

Myanmar, Burma, workshop, democracy, education, UN, parliament

It is an undeniably odd sight: a member of Myanmar’s military sitting in uniform taking notes on the basics of democracy. Next to him sit former political prisoners and human rights activists who now hold a majority in the country’s first credible parliament. Aung San Suu Kyi won a landmark general election last year, making her the de facto head of government. But her team of neophyte legislators, many of whom were locked up for years by the junta, are in need of a class in how to run the country. […] And so the former enemies sat down last week at desks in parliament to attend a United Nations-led intensive course on how to carry out the job of being an MP in a modern democracy.

via http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/26/myanmar-generals-democracy-school-new-civilian-mps

Geomancy and Earth Codes

earth coding, sonic acts, workshop, FoAM, geomancy

Akin to the psycho-geographical derive, we walked through electromagnetic and coding territory, to observe what we would find rather than seeking out. Our actions, a form of contemporary geomancy, concentrated on the interacting signals between the atmosphere, the ground, and ourselves – all potential sites of transmitting, receiving, disrupting, and originating signals. Unlike outright divination, the more general category of scrying is a system for asking questions without solutions.

http://sonicacts.com/2015/blog/geomancy-and-earth-codes

Reading Earth/Worm Poetry

earth coding, sonic acts, workshop, FoAM, geomancy

Through exploratory field trips that focused our attention down into the earth, we opened a window into a world of telluric currents and fugitive radio waves that normally would remain unnoticed or inaudible. This was achieved through iterative, performative processes in the field: at one point, we plunged a circuit board into the soil to listen for what the earth (and a few worms we found there) might have to “say:” the currents thus detected were fed directly into a computer where they were “translated” via Python program into letters and spaces of the English alphabet. This process resulted in a “worm poetry.” This process quite literally returns circuitry to the earth from which it once came, in effect inducing the earth (and its intimate inhabitants, worms) code itself.

http://sonicacts.com/2015/blog/reading-earthworm-poetry

Relearn

relearn, constant, OSP, workshop, pedagogy, pattern, free software, design

By and large, graphic design students bring a laptop to school, and create their work using digital software tools. This hard- and software represent a technological and cultural heritage that is seldomly questioned, and a potential that goes unexploited. Using free and open source software and engaging in its culture provides an alternative by making a design practice possible with a more intimate and experimental relation to its toolbox. Beyond the implications for design practice, the culture of free and open source software challenges traditional education paradigms because knowledge is exchanged outside institutional borders, and participants move between roles easily (teacher, student, developer, user). Following from their series of workshops and Print Parties, OSP proposes a summer school experiment. A first try to move across the conventional school model towards a space where the relationship to learning is mediated by graphical software.

http://relearn.be/