Workshops

Supervised by Paul Paper

Dates:  16-17 August 2018

Volume: 12 hours + 14 independent work hours, 1 ECTS

Location:  Tallinn, Estonia

Number of participants: max 20

Cost: 290 €

Registration deadline:  6th of May

This short course will explore how visual recognition and AI-related technologies are changing the discourse of photography, challenging the traditional boundaries of the medium. Empowered by machine learning, visual recognition systems are entering the sphere of everyday life. From student dorms equipped with facial recognition in China to privately-owned surveillance systems in the US and UK, the technology is being rapidly deployed in a global rise of biometrics. What this transformation – and the resultant streams of endless machine-made images – offers is some innovative ways to think about the practice of image-making.

The course will provide students with the historical background of facial recognition and an opportunity to test and discuss some of the new technological features, as well as ask why and in what ways do these developments matter? Specific attention will be given to some of the problematic aspects of biometric surveillance and various ways artists are using new systems to produce meanings that challenge the dominant political discourse.

This course is meant for photography and visual arts students and those interested in the current technological developments in image-making, as well as their political, social and cultural implications.

Topics to be discussed:

– Visual recognition technology, apps and programmes using it and current development.

– Politics of (technological) vision and machine seeing.

– The historical context of 19^th century facial recognition discourse, as well as current research.

– The idea of pre-crime prevention and problematic aspects of biometric surveillance: prejudices in-built in the current systems of facial recognition and the “right to remain anonymous”.

– Artistic series that use – and comment on – current technology and ways of resisting visual identification.

More information and link to registration: https://www.artun.ee/summeracademy/photography-and-image-making/

Supervised by Jaanus Sakkis

Dates:  16-18 August 2018

Volume: 18 hours + 12 independent work hours, 1 ECTS

Location:  Tallinn, Estonia

Number of participants: max 20

Cost: 490 €
Price includes breakfasts, lunches, refreshments throughout, course materials, certificate of completion.

The course is aimed at graphic/web designers with 2+ years experience (page layout, colour, typography, visual communication).

Registration deadline:  6th of May

In addition to the general required materials, candidates are expected to submit a letter of motivation explaining why they are applying and what is their experience with User Experience and Branding so far(max A4). Participants are expected to bring their own sketchbooks, markers and laptops.

In this course, we will focus on brand-building in the context of the user experience (UX). If you look at the most popular brands in the digital field – Instagram, Uber, Dropbox etc – they are all built on a user experience design.

“Today, a brand is the holistic sum of customers’ experiences, composed of visual, tonal and behavioral brand components, many of which are shaped by interaction design.”
(Kate Kaplan /Nielsen Norman Group)

Great designers justify every decision in their design process in the interests of the best possible final product. If you need to justify your ideas and methods, you need to know the answers or solutions and that requires challenging yourself and asking the right questions. Our main topic will be understanding the user – what the user sees and how they feel when interacting with your product or service. How to make yourself as visual as possible? How to see these blind spots? These are places where we can lose our customers because we can’t understand why they don’t see how things are working.

We will also talk about how to ask questions. Questions are the main tools for the designers. If we don’t collect any data from our users, we make assumptions about what they like and want. When we make those assumptions, we begin to design for ourselves, not our users. We shouldn’t forget we are not our users.

In our lecture, we will talk about how UX is the future of branding. We’ll start from the beginning and talk about the main principles and differences in branding and UX.

*As designers, we know both user experience and branding are fighting a common enemy – people are confusing it with the visual elements alone. People might say they’re building a brand but they’re actually working on a logo design. As famously put by Marty Neumeier: “The brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.”

During this 3-day session, you will learn:

• History and background of UX
• Introduction to the UX Fundamentals
• Learn to sketch smarter – wireframes and prototypes
• Visual design principles
• How to take “You” out of the user
• How to make your content make sense
• Watching users – listen and observe
• Understand the true idea of branding and why people buy brands
• Define a real value of your product
• Real-world tips and tricks
• A clear understanding of the principles and benefits of good UX and how to apply it to your design.

More information and link to registration: https://www.artun.ee/summeracademy/how-to-develop-ux/

Dates:  6-10 August 2018

Volume: 40 hours, 3 ECTS

Location:  Tallinn, Estonia

Number of participants: max 20

Cost: FREE (Please note that this course is meant for higher education students only)

Registration deadline:  6th of May

Aimed at design students; no programming skills necessary.

In addition to the general required materials, candidates are expected to submit a letter of motivation explaining why they are applying  and outlining their experience with Interaction Design so far (max A4). Students are expected to bring their own sketchbooks, markers and laptops.

Over the course of a week you will learn about the foundations, history and possible futures of interaction design within a studio environment. This 5-day hands-on workshop provides a solid foundational knowledge of user experience (UX) design  for new practitioners, as well as an in-depth exploration of interaction design for experienced designers. The course gives participants space and guidance to delve deeply into theoretical and practical aspects of interaction design by investigating contemporary issues and proposing design solutions.

Through a series of lectures, films, historic case studies and studio practice, participants will explore the nature and aesthetics of interaction design in the digital and physical space, in individual and group studio practice from ideation and the iterative design process to presentations and critique.

Learning outcomes:

• Learn about design foundations, theory, history and practice
• Understand how to look at problems from social, technological, economic and cultural perspectives
• Practice design research and synthesis
• Learn how to be creative in the digital realm
• Improve your ability to present your design concepts
• Practice working individually and in small teams

More information and link to registration: https://www.artun.ee/summeracademy/interaction-design-tomorrow/

Dates:  6-11 August 2018

Volume: 6 days, 3 ECTS

Location:  Estonian Academy of Arts

Number of participants: max 22

Cost: FREE (Please note that this course is meant for higher education students only.)

Registration deadline:  6th of May

Students applying for a slot in this workshop are asked to submit a CV and cover letter describing why they wish to participate and whether they have any old article of clothing to bring with them to Estonia. The cover letter should also reveal why they are interested in restoring textiles and haute couture.

Aim of the course:

• bring a disappearing specialized manual skill to Estonia and teach it to Estonian and international students
• restore articles of clothing in the collection of some Estonian museum and thereby contribute to the preservation of an exhibit item with historical value.

Course content:

The course provides practical and theoretical knowledge of how to restore old clothing – selection of fabrics, stitches and seams, treatment of the material, how different materials age, how to care for and restore different fabrics. In the course of the workshop, students will learn about the internal structure of haute couture clothing, allowing them to later create period-specific silhouettes or re-interpretations of them – pattern solutions for textiles, materials. The course will provide knowledge and skills that can be used to get closer to the secrets of high fashion. All of the participants in the course will be able to restore a part of dresses brought in by the lecturer.

The course teaches handicraft skills that have become a rarity, something highly sought-after among professionals. ˇFewer and fewer people practise these skills in a world dominated by modern fashions. Today clothing made 40, 50, even 100 years ago are held in high regard, as they involved the use of original patterns, hand stitching, high-quality tailoring. To this point, the creation of such clothing have remained shrouded in arcane mystery – they seem easy to imitate at first glance but it is impossible to achieve the right effect without knowing what is going on “under the dress.”

The course is mainly meant for fashion design, theatre design, restoration and design students.

More information and link to registration: https://www.artun.ee/summeracademy/the-anatomy-of-couture/

Dates: 20-24 August 2018

Volume: 40 hours, 3 ECTS

Location: Department of Architecture at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Pikk tn 20, Tallinn

Number of participants: max 25

Cost: FREE (Please note that this course is meant for higher education students only.)

Registration deadline: 6th of May

In case of high volume of applications, prospective participants are asked to write an essay one A4-format page in length (approximately 250 words).

Content of the course

This workshop is structured on architecture, numbers and cognition with the focus mainly on public space. Two broader topics pervade the workshop. One of them is more physical, involving translating the world into parameters, and the other is mapping social activities. The broad goal is to find connections between the two sets of topics. The environment around us consists of a number of physically countable and measurable parameters, which we can use to describe it (width of a carriageway, location of a cafe). Which parameters are the best for describing or designing the world?  As another important topic, we will map the movements or activities of human masses, using photo and image analysis and Wi-Fi positioning to this end. When, why and where are people moving and how long do they stop – this is an important set of topics, because the quality of space is largely dependent on the presence of people.  The participants in the summer academy course will be challenged to find relationships between the physical world and human activity. It will be important to find a means and method for measuring and documenting the environment. Cognition referred to in the course name refers to experience that can be used in future to make decisions to design and re-design space.  Ideally, we envision the participants who complete the academy to be capable of imagining and perceiving the implications of 1,000 people or 100 cars passing a point.

Picking key parameters (properties) from this environment has long received attention from urbanism scholars: William H. Whyte, who attempted to trace patterns of use of public space, or Kevin Lynch, who tried to find the mental model people use to understand a city.

The late 20th century brought a rise in computing power, which has resulted in change in the accuracy and use of many calculations. In the past, it was not conceivable to calculate trajectories from one building to another manually, but it is now possible. Alongside this trend, a completely new field has arisen: various kinds of simulations. Simulations make it possible to model traffic, pedestrians or both at the same time. Gathering data has become more intensive with a focus moving from gathering qualitative data to collecting quantitative data.  A large part of the summer school involves field observations, which helps instil intuition in participants as to what a given indicator means. This will also give them a clearer understanding of the computational processes and outcomes and they will be able to rationally assess the outcomes of some simulation or facts presented to them.

Participants will become well-versed in methods and means for quantitatively and qualitatively documenting the street-level space, which can in turn later be used for analysis of other places. The participant will also receive an overview of and access to software used in the framework of the workshop. At the end of the summer school, all of the data that was gathered will be made public to allow third parties to use them in their projects – for example, to plan more fluid, safer traffic conditions.

November 27, 11.00 – 17.00 (Estonia pst 7 room 426)
November 28, 11 – 15 (Estonia pst 7 room 440a)

By Aslaug Nyrnes and Nina Schjønsby

The seminar will focus on various forms of writing in the context of artistic research. Through text examples we aim to reflect on different options and challenges typical of texts in the genre.

We will give two short lectures (30 minutes each):

Professor Aslaug Nyrnes:

A topological perspective on writing in artistic research: Between personal notes and academic thesis

Assistant Professor Nina Schjønsby:

Developing a text as a social and critical act

With these lectures as a starting point and throughout the seminar we will discuss principal questions on writing. The focus will be on different genres, the structure of the text, criticality, references and the writer’s voice.

All participants are welcome to submit a text in progress. Notes, abstracts, articles, essays, catalogue texts, reflections, etc. are equally welcome, but the text should not exceed 5 pages. All submitted texts will be read by all participants, and everyone will receive feedback on their writings during the seminar. 

Send the text to elika.kiilo@artun.ee

Deadline: November 22, 2017 

Registration form.

Aslaug Nyrnes is professor at the University of Bergen. She defended her doctoral degree on the didactics of the author Ludvig Holberg in 2002, Det didaktiske rommet. Didaktisk topologi i Ludvig Holbergs Moralske Tanker (Universitetet i Bergen, 2002). Her current research focuses on didactics in arts. Her works include “Lighting from the side: rhetoric and artistic research” in Sensuous knowledge: focus on artistic research and development (KHiB, 2006) and a large number of articles.

Nina Schjønsby is an art historian working with text and publishing in the art field. She runs the independent publishing house Tekstbyrået, together with writer and translator Halvor Haugen, and she is also a freelance editor. She teaches at the Art Academy in Oslo, and at the Faculty of Art, Music and Design in Bergen. Schjønsby has contributed to art magazines such as Ekfrase, Rhizome: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Billedkunst and SITE.

This event is supported by the ASTRA project of the Estonian Academy of Arts – EKA LOOVKÄRG (European Union, European Regional Development Fund).

Külli Triin-Laanet’s drawing

On the 20th of September, artist Hana Miletić will hold a public talk about her practice at Estonian Academy of Arts. The talk takes place on the 20.09 at 18 o’clock at Estonia pst 7, room 440a. The talk is open for everyone.
Miletić comes to Tallinn at the invitation of the photography department of Estonian Academy of Arts. She will hold a workshop with the photography students on artist book making, drawing on the work of Mladen Stilinović, amongst other. For the production of the printed matter, the students are invited to use and appropriate the immediate surroundings of the school.
Hana Miletić was born in Zagreb (1982), she lives and works in Brussels and Zagreb. In her work she explores the residues and upheavals of political changes, whereby she focuses on the formation of subjectivity, on the level of both the individual and the community. She describes her artistic practice as street photography via which she documents objects and narratives in a continuous investigation into DIY cultures. Photography serves as a means of orientation in her ongoing exploration of social realities. She has a multiform practice that includes, among others, sculptures, textiles, performances, workshops, printed matter and writing.

Portrait photo by: Miles Fischler

Press release by:

Laura Kuusk
Associate professor and project manager
Department of Photography
Estonian Academy of Arts
+372 55 584 609
laura.kuusk@artun.ee

You are very welcome to attend the open presentation of the results of the Tallinn Summer Academy – Numbers and Cognition in Urban Environment workshop results on August 25 at 2 pm. The presentation will take place at the Faculty of Architecture, Pikk 20, Tallinn on 3rd floor, main lecture room.

International students from top architecture schools worked on data collection in the urban environment and formed visualisations of the results. Come and see for yourself!