Workshop Statement

Momentous places and stories become a visual network of stories in the megacity Istanbul and blogosphere. Swarm Istanbul is an interactive movie about being in Istanbul. Emotional map presents life and living.  Swarms of people, short stories and streaming resources networks city with energy that will be presented through an interactive map. The workshop connects physical cityscape to virtual cityscape and allows people to navigate through localized videos to referring videos of same place and similar kind of events in social media and videos. It can be navigated through webpage with laptop or mobile. Participants will learn to do own visual and auditive content from their important places and embed them to their own maps and data streams. The philosophy of documenting the environment is partly derived from ideas based on work of R. Murray Schaeffer and the subject of acoustic ecology. Core idea of the workshop is to hack the notion of city towards self generated geographical and mental map of place rather than environment or notion of public space controlled by authority and media. The work  adopts its background from open source and DIY approach. It allows and hopefully encourages people to build similar kinds of documentary inspired works and maps from their own urban territories. Groups of people in theworkshop will explore the city of Istanbul from their own perspectives with personal mobile cameras and/or tools that can be provided by organizers. Collected visual and sonic data is edited and located to modified map through a collaborative work process. Collection of short films ranging from abstract short glimpses of notions of city to short stories of individual important places is placed to web via google maps, to present a collection of personal views growing as unique small interactive movie about Istanbul. Participants need laptops and mobile devices with cameras or/digital cameras.

• Antti Tenetz is equal parts artist and naturalist.  He has worked and filmed throughout the North, from the Ice Sea to Siberia, and as far south as South Thailand and Greece. His works are at the crossroads of media – bio and urban arts,  Sci/Art, nature, documentary and interactive spaces. Tenetz has contributed exhibition designs, multimedia and documentaries to science and art exhibitions ranging in subject from arctic reindeer herders to interactive cityscapes. He is also actively participating as VJ in urban arts events.  The work he is doing about the wild nature human and non-human relations goes far beyond all the usual clichés and the “green-hype” movement.  His works have exhibited widely including  Thessaloniki Contemporary art museum of Greece 2009, Academy of Fine Arts Katowice 2009 (e-mobilart program), Tromsø Kunstforening 2010, and Murmansk Art Museum 2010.  Winner of three Finnish na-tional snow sculpting championships (1997 Gold, 2003 Bronze, 2005 Silver), Tenetz personifies a melding of the ar-tistic and arctic. tenetz.com
• Kristian Ekholm holds a M.A. in Theatre Arts from the Finnish Theatre Academy in the department of light and sound design. He is a sound artist who works mainly within the field of the performing arts, especially with site spe-cific performative installations and contemporary performative art. Lately, he has shifted focus to the spatial dimen-sions of sound, seeking inspiration in the physical, virtual and narrative dimensions of space. He has toured exten-sively in Europe with productions like Anatomia Lear (2008), for which he was also awarded the annual SÄDE – prize for Best Sound Design (Thalia-Gala 2010, Helsinki). His focus is in converging temporal narrations with spatial dimensions.