Palla E.E., Floros A., Loufopoulos A.

Presented: DCAC — Digital Cultures and Audiovisual Challenges, Ionian University, Online, Corfu, May 28-29, 2021

Workshop held: Corfu Archaeological Museum, May 2019, link

An experimental workshop for children and young adolescents, made as part of master's research in audiovisual arts at the Ionian University — supervised by Angelos Floros on the interactive installations and advised by Apostolos Loufopoulos on sound.

It was designed within interdisciplinary learning and participatory art, on the practices of maker culture and STEAM education, to test two things: whether creative learning works better outside the classroom, and whether visual art, sound and the humanities can be integrated in something hands-on rather than described.

The participants were eleven to fifteen years old. They were taken first to the archaic pediment held in the museum — Artemis-Gorgo — and to the myth around it and what it meant to the people who carved it.

Then they were divided.

One group built electronic circuits that produced sound through photocells and conductive paint. The other made conductive drawings, lines and forms taken from the imagery of the pediment.

The two halves were then joined: circuits and sensors used to read the tonal variations and the line-work of the drawings. The children experimented on their own drawings, played them, improvised, and presented what they had made and felt to an audience. Each of them filled in a research form afterwards.

The paper documents the design and the running of the workshop in detail — as one case within a longer argument about image and sound, about art and technology, and about what participation in making does for learning in a community.