Tinkering World Tour 'Season One' Clips

Last spring we had an amazing online workshop where a group of participants took a guided journey around the world to meet local tinkerers who are experimenting with art, science, technology and other topics. As a little recap before we launch A Tinkering Tour ‘Season Two’ in September, I wanted to share a short video from each of the five sessions to get a flavor of the experience.

In the first session in Nairobi (Kenya), dance educators Franco Odhiambo and Jenniffer Nyakaru of ChezaCheza led the group in a warm-up and then spoke about the ways that movement and dance allows youth in their community to feel more confident and have a sense of belonging. In the Nairobi session we also visited the Gmin makerspace and Kelvin Kangethe, a local artist.

For our second session, local artist Booky Margoof shared a project that made use of scraps that she found on the frozen rivers of Berlin (Germany) and led participants in a making activity. For the Berlin session we also explored street art with Niklas Roy, electronic music with Playtronica and took a tour of the Futurium lab.

In the third session we headed to Japan and visited local makers in Tokyo and Kyoto. Tiffany Tseng took us behind the scenes to see her process of creating a food journal to document all the things she ate during residency at the University of Tokyo. We also enjoyed a out of this world performance by JIKU (Ami Yamasaki and Michael Smith-Welch), visited Tsukuru Manabu science museum in a traditional Kyoto house and made wind sculptures with Make:Japan.

For our fourth workshop we headed to New Mexico (USA) and visited professor Leah Buechley who shared about local mural traditions and the ways that her research group experiments with technology. We also dedicated the second half of the workshop to alternate realities and imagined worlds with two artists from the incredible Meow Wolf!

And in the final session we visited Aarhus (Denmark) and Kenn and Annabelle from A Secret Club facilitated an online workshop where we made lost and found posters for fantastic beasts. We also toured a beached play festival with Liam Nilsen and the Dokk1 library makerspace with Amos Blanton and Jane Kunze.

This is just a small taste of the experimental, inspiring and wildly creative projects and spaces that we visited on the world tour. We were so excited about the first round of the workshop that we are now planning ‘season two’ for the fall of 2021 where we will visit Emilia-Romagna (Italy), Mexicali (Mexico), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Kathmandu (Nepal), and Singapore (Singapore)!

You can sign up today to join us either on zoom as a live workshop participant or MOOC style where you get the videos the day after the session and can follow on your own time. There will be a padlet page where we share our projects, discuss the sessions and ask questions to the guest artists. And once you sign up for ‘season two’ on our indiegogo page you will also receive access to all five videos of ‘season one’ so you can go back and check out the entire ten session workshop journey from start to finish. I hope you can join for the second round of this incredible adventure.