GLOBAL TOOLS Workshops

Global Tools at SALT offers three workshops on Construction, Communication and Survival, all critical topics within the multidisciplinary experimental program of design education founded in Italy in 1973. Each workshop accepts 10 participants from art, design and architecture backgrounds. Workshops start on March 13, 19.00 at SALT Galata with an introduction by the tutors Alessandro Mason, Paolo Patelli, Herkes İçin Mimarlık and the curators Silvia Franceschini and Valerio Borgonuovo. The workshops continue throughout the day on March 14 leading into the Global Tools symposium that takes place on March 15. Participants are welcome to register online.

Workshop: SURVIVAL
Designing Artifacts for Urban Survival by Herkes İçin Mimarlık

This workshop will be held in Turkish. For more information please click here.

Workshop: COMMUNICATION
Untethered Polyphonies by Paolo Patelli

While current discourses around urbanism and communication seem largely concerned with efficiency and optimality of performance, during the workshop, we will explore alternative narratives between urban life and media technology. Discussing urban scenes and models as well as communication, social networking, data collection and the “internet-of-things”, we will try to challenge the vision of a top-down, all-sensing city of the future. We will look for discourses which are lived in the mobility of perceptions, by different spectators. We will decode the polyphonic voices which are interwoven between the street and the social web. Activists, artists, and designers will take the place of the technocrati-elite and the security agency in a sort of group therapy, as they manipulate data and infrastructure to craft escape plans for the medium and its users. We will explore residual degrees of freedom from inside the architecture of social media, appropriating commercial tools, subverting their inherent logic, filters and controls. Participants will tinker with a “decoding toolkit” - pieces of software written in Processing and installed on Raspberry Pi boards, which harvest geo-localized content from Twitter, manipulate text, produce audio. The transformation of data flows into fully visible (or better: audible) agents provides a possible model for opening up to new forms of civic and aesthetic engagement with communications and the city.

Language: English
Requirements: All the participants should bring a computer. Basic knowledge of Processing and Twitter is recommended, but not obliged.

Workshop: CONSTRUCTION
Earthworks by Alessandro Mason

The project focuses on the concept of self-treatment for the reappropriation of body and space. Self-treatment as self construction of tools/machines/processes, to solve primary needs, such as the cultivation of vegetables, digging the earth, building a temporary house or simply taking a moment to pause. These survivalist actions attempt to imagine the physical and political re-use of residual spaces in the city, those spaces left unplanned that exist between the urban and rural, through the practice of starting to construct from a primary element: the earth. The workshop will be based on the research and methodology of Opensource Ecology with the idea to make tools and building processes accessible and easy for everyone.

Language: English
Requirements: Basic construction skills

Alessandro Mason (Workshop: CONSTRUCTION)
Alessandro Mason is an architect and designer. Since his studies in architecture at Politecnico di Milano he has been conducting a personal research on art, craft and design, developing his skills working in the studio of Antony Gormley (London) and Sou Fujimoto (Tokyo). In 2010 he founded Gisto, an experimental interdisciplinary laboratory for auto-construction and he is collaborating with Slowd, a platform that connects designers and craft companies to revolutionize the way we produce and distribute new products.

Paolo Patelli (Workshop: COMMUNICATION)
Paolo Patelli is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Politecnico di Milano, and is a research consultant and co-author of Urban Sensing. His work is a design-based investigation on the ways hybrid publics and situated practices can reconnect the physical dimension of the city with the affordances of a networked public sphere. In 2011 he was a visiting PhD researcher at MIT’s Senseable City Lab. His personal projects have been presented at the CCA in Montreal, at Hybrid Cities in Athens and at Punta della Dogana during the the XIII Venice Architecture Biennale.

Herkes İçin Mimarlık (Workshop: HAYATTA KALMAK)
This workshop will be held in Turkish. For more information please click here.

In collaboration with