My FSCONS

Traditionally, universities create technology students or art students but rarely mix features of both in the same person. Hopes are rested in hybrid personalities which fluidly cross the chasm between technology and arts as mutations in the current academic system. Although that hybrids exist the process of their formation and development is rather omitted in scientific research. Trying to fill this gap the idea of establishing Hybrid Atelier came in to being.

The possible presentation would describe the concept, implementation, and current outputs of Hybrid Atelier, a research and artistic project devoted to simultaneous practice in art and programming with open source languages. In this case open source software (OSS) is assumed as a great support in discovering new artistic pathways. In the special interest of the atelier is to observe the process of becoming hybrid skilled personalities able to fluently join art of their creative minds with craft of programming skills.

Design and framework of Hybrid Atelier is structured according to the metaphor of software release life cycle. Each stage development contains evolved and iterated findings of the previous one. Therefore alpha status (0) symbolize preparatory phase focussed on literature review. Beta status (1) is a series of the short-term computer based art, namely computer art, workshops focussed on various groups of stakeholders differing regarding to the level of their art and programming knowledge. Release candidate (2) contains three, long-term modules focussed on different OSS programming languages (Processing, Arduino, and OpenFrameworks) explored by teams of artists and programmers who, by working together, exchange knowledge and undergo a hybridization. Final release (3) is a workshop based collaboration part exploring possibilities of cooperation between hybrids.

The atelier functions in the framework of PhD research of Agnieszka Pokrywka, supervised by Letizia Jaccheri.