Brooklyn’s fourth annual Inventgenuity Festival, presented by Beam Center, fills two large gallery spaces with fun and engaging hands-on activities. With public projects and workshops led by Beam Center’s faculty of artists, engineers and big thinkers, the Inventgenuity Festival has become a popular annual winter celebration of making things for kids and their parents.
At the Inventgenuity Festival, kids will playfully and productively investigate what digital technology and manual mechanisms have in common. In two days of hands-on workshops and on-going collective projects led by expert makers and manipulators of sound, image, electricity, and motion kids will explore this year’s theme, DIGITAL BY HAND.
Says Beam Center’s Co-Founder Danny Kahn: “We love watching kids jump behind and beyond the screen to discover how the magic is made and meeting the artists and engineers that make it through nothing less than hard work, persistence and imagination. We feel it’s our job, our mission really, to physicalize and make play out of concepts that are generally veiled in mystery and expertise.”
In the weekend’s big Project designed by Allen Riley, “Physical Video Processing Unit,” kids will become the bits and bytes of a room-sized video machine creating filters and video effects with bodies and a VHS tape. Participation in the project is free. Attendees may also sign-up for one of the rotating slate of 45-minute workshops. Scheduled workshops will explore DIGITAL BY HAND through animation (Brett Van Aalsburg), sound (Daniel Fishkin), convection (Reid Bingham), electronics (Susan Ngo), handmade motors (Eun Jung (EJ) Park), and painting (Jaclyn Brown).
On View
January 26–27
Location
51 st Bergen St
Gallery Hours
ThursdaySaturday, 1–7pm
Sunday, 1–5pm