Social
Spaces

SKOR organizes a lecture and debate on Google & privacy, following the latest issue, nr. 19 of Open. Cahier over kunst en het publieke domein, entitled Voorbij Privacy.

More info: http://www.skor.nl/article-4925-nl.html

Tomorrow For Real opens in Maastricht and Hasselt. This is an art festival that deals with the interrelations between video, art and public space. For Real presents screenings by many interesting artists in public space. Besides that, the festival organises a symposium tomorrow where Social Spaces will be presenting. If you want to participate in the symposium, you first have to register via email (sanne@for-real.eu).

Viewmaster Foundation, the Maastricht Academy for Fine Arts and Design and Maastricht University / Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (Media Culture Master) organise a symposium on the dynamic relationship between virtuality and reality in public spaces and the role of video art in that. How does the public space act when it is used for alternative artistic purposes?

More information: http://www.for-real.eu/symposium.php?lang=uk

Tomorrow is the first day of the two-day kick off workshop of ‘Alter Nature – My biological (r)evolution’. During this workshop, moderated by critical designer James King and synthetic biologist James Brown,  the students will get an introduction in the latest developments within synthetic biology, and the implications of this for society.

The goal of this first part of the workshop is that the students gain an understanding of the underlying science (the “biological reality”) of synthetic biology and learn to distinguish it from the hype. That they  - in fact – are able to tell fact from fiction.

To find out if the students succeeded  and read their experiences on the project: www.mad-fac.be/alternature

OpenIDEO is an online platform where people design together for social good. On this platform you can find different challenges who are devided into three development phases : inspiration, concepting, and evaluation. Community members can contribute in a variety of different ways, from inspirational observations and photos, sketches of ideas, to business models and snippets of code. For students and starting designers, this can be a great way to test their ideas to a multi-disciplinary community. Want to know more? Watch their video:

Introduction to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.

Want to participate? Go to http://openideo.com/

On Saturday 18th September, Andrea Wilkinson, Katrien Dreessen and myself took part in a workshop on Arduino. Arduino is an open source microcontroller that can be programmed by computer relatively easy. It can be used to control robots, to make automatic irrigation systems, to control rotating tripods for a camera or an electric guitar and so on. Arduino is user-friendly and designed for those who don’t have a background in programming and electronics. For about three hours, we experimented with LEDs, wires, transistors, solderless breadboards and other interesting materials. The workshop was organized by the people of timelab (Ghent) and took place at the Cultuurcentrum Genk.