BROOKLYN, New York (12/21/11) – Brooklyn’s third annual Inventgenuity Festival (The Invisible Dog Art Center, Saturday, January 21 and Sunday, January 22) is presented by Beam Camp, a New Hampshire summer camp for the applied arts, technology and collaboration. The weekend Festival will be loaded with a tremendous range of activities led by Beam’s staff of artists, engineers and big thinkers. This year’s festival serves as a launch event for Beam’s new Brooklyn-based Inventgenuity Workshop, an after school program for kids 7 – 14 enrolling now for classes starting in March 2012.
At the Inventgenuity Festival kids will be encouraged to take the place apart piece by piece. As a celebration of design, building, reuse and art, however, they’ll also put it back together again in imaginative ways. The 2012 Inventgenuity Festival will explore DIS/ASSEMBLY with two days of hands-on workshops and on-going collective projects led by expert makers, unmakers and re-makers of sound, electricity, food and objects of all kinds.
Says Beam Co-Director Danny Kahn: “Our goal is to have kids get inside and behind the inner-workings of the systems and structures that surround them. Working with artists and engineers to deconstruct and reinvent is an inspiring way to to start understanding how things really come together.”
The weekend’s big Project, “The Dis/Assembly Line,” is an evolving decomposition and aesthetic reprocessing of an entire room of everyday objects. Kids will join kinetic art mechanic Steve Gerberich and sculptor Nathaniel Lieb as they dissect, sort and reconfigure artifacts into 2D and 3D sculpture. Attendees may also sign-up for one of the rotating slate of 45-minute workshops. Scheduled workshops will explore the Dis/Assembly theme through sound (Natalie Elizabeth Weiss), puppetry (Jonny Clockworks), food (Kathryn Wallem), electronics (Ed Bear), language in 3D (Eun Jung (EJ) Park), craft (Julie Schneider), video (Allen Riley and Jeff Sisson), and painting (Adam Matta).
Brooklyn Inventgenuity Festival takes place at The Invisible Dog Art Center on Saturday, January 21 and Sunday, January 22 from 11am – 5pm. Festival admission is free, but advance sign-up is required. Required advance registration can be done at http://www.beamcamp.com/inventgenuity. All workshops will repeat throughout the day. Most workshops will take place both days of the festival.
Workshop registration will take place at the Festival. There is a $5 materials charge for some workshops. Families can also view video presentations about Beam’s summer and after school programs.
The Inventgenuity Festival travels to Boston in March.
ABOUT BEAM CAMP Beam Camp offers two 4 week summer sessions for kids aged 7-17 in Strafford, New Hampshire. Beam Campers cultivate hands-on skills while exploring innovative thinking, design and the creative process. They swim, hike, play games and enjoy 750 acres of mountain, forests and lakes, while transforming ideas into artifacts and personal achievement into community success.