Drawing / painting / photo / video / VJing / DJing / cooking workshop series leading to a real time media performance fest in the framework of the festival Soho in Ottakring
participants / artists the kids from yppenplatz
kids coaching sonja / tuerkan / martin / florian / ruprecht / hans …
visual production coaching alexandra reill
audio production coaching florian / martin
idea / concept alexandra reill
coordination elke probst / alexandra reill / ula schneider / sabine walchhuetter
technical production muck / peter riedl
public relations martina montecuccoli
production soho in ottakring in cooperation with wiener kinderfreunde
and kanonmedia / vienna 2004
On occasion of the art festival Soho in Ottakring kanonmedia installed a media lab for the kids who usually hang out at Yppenplatz and the neighbored center of Wiener Kinderfreunde. Alexandra Reill staged a collaborative multimedia scenario on the basis of a series of workshops on video and photo shooting and [digital] drawing followed by VJing and DJing.
In a preparatory phase the kids participating in the K.I.O. Lab creatively worked with analogue and digital methods of multimedia production. They collectively shot scenes out of their daily life with a digital camera, made digital photos and created colorful drawings and paintings. In an interim phase, the analogue pieces were digitized and transformed into a catalogue of animations and VJing sets.
In a first phase, the audiovisual workshops concentrated on girls only who needed a very sensitive coaching approach. The majority of the girls felt afraid of the multimedia equipment, was concerned about damaging the machines and did not dare to try out what they could perform on a computer or a video mixer. Regarding the audio production, the girls were far more fascinated by the microphone than by the audio mixer and their favorite approach was singing the songs they’ve known from little on.
The second phase invited boys to join the audiovisual performing teams. From the very beginning they were keen to experiment with the equipment. The playing of Turkish and Serbian pop hits was big fun for them whereas the visual editing and real time compositioning through the layering of video sequences and graphic clips in combination with animated filters and effects especially attracted kids and teens with visual talents.
In a finalizing phase “The kids of Yppenplatz” trained – again on a purely intuitive basis – how to perform in real time, without breaks, without disturbances, as cooperative audiovisual teams working together. The individual kid could relate to the other ones through the rhythms of music and visual animations, and some of them even managed to let go tensions and aggressive feelings in the framework of collaborative workflows based on intuitive apprehension.
In the evening of the last workshop module the teams presented their creative skills and talents to an adult audience mainly coming out of a Vienna cultural scene. The audience seemed fully overwhelmed by the sensual intensity of the atmosphere the kids created. The creative intensity of the kids’ real time performance let the adults fully indulge in the kids’ ways of life. Adults and kids were dancing Turkish dances together, smiles were evoked continuously. Last but not least, the adult audience was ‘spoiled’ by the kids who had been cooking big portions of delicious curd soup with mint, followed by beef in aubergine, during the afternoon to offer hot food to the guests in the evening.
The conscious constellation of juvenile and adult methods of creative production in combination with the fact that the kids and youngsters had the chance to quickly reach very appealing results of creative production through the simply to use but very adult technologies applied enhanced the kids and teens, mostly with migrant background and members of second and third generations of families having come to live in Vienna from Turkey, Serbia, Croatia, some of them having Roma background, and they strongly identified with an elaboration of creative vision.
All learning was purely based on an experimental, intuitive basis as opposed to theoretical, linear and efficiency-oriented methods of teaching. Creative vision could be experienced through playing, trying out, experimenting, researching. A transdisciplinary approach allowed the kids to change between application fields, such as audio production, digital imagery production and real time performance techniques.
All the workshops were kept open – the kids could play football or whatever analogue kids’ games they like to play in their daily lives. This approach allowed the kids to relax from digital complexities when they had the need to and at the same time to naturally integrate these complexities of IT-applications in the course of their day. kanonmedia could notice with joy that in the course of the transdisciplinary K.I.O. Lab workshops – with the real time creative performance in form of a party as final highlight – children, juvenile and adult representatives of different cultures were finding themselves prepared for open communication and fearless contact on a collective human-to-human-basis, music and visual worlds bringing people together, far beyond ideological thoughts or trained attitudes.
K.I.O. Lab staged at
— soho in ottakring / vie / a / 04
K.I.O. Lab featured by
— artsuche / d / 11
— online zeitung der universität wien / vie / a / 04
— pid-rathauskorrespondenz. apa ots / vie / a / 04
— webservice der stadt wien / vie / a / 04
— radio orange / vie / a / 04
— radio afrika / vie / a / 04
— der standard / vie / a / 04
— die krone / vie / a / 04
— kurier / vie / a / 04
— wiener zeitung / vie / a / 04
— bezirkszeitung w16 / vie / a / 04
— der falter / vie / a / 04
— mund / vie / a / 04
— bild.punkt / vie / a / 04
— kinoki lumal / vie / a / 04
— kinoki-mikrokino / vie / a / 04