AA Shop-Front Fab Workshop São Paulo

I'm glad to announce that once again, I'm invited to be a tutor at the AA Visiting School São Paulo. Here's the release:

2012 AA shop-front fab WORKSHOP

FILE - Electronic Language International Festival
10-19 July, 2012

The baixo-centre Barra Funda of São Paulo, was once characterized by a vibrant mix of small industrial, commercial and residential programmes. Yet, as economic policies over time favoured a monopolization of larger production industries, companies abandoned the city centre and moved to the periphery and abroad. Rather than solely introducing new programs for the post-industrial landscape, the workshop proposes the creation of new-types of micro industries to produce a mix of both consumption and production within the centre, thus creating an urban policy of 'pro-sumption', manifested through micro-manufacturing interventions that can co-exist alongside retail and housing.  The workshop posits that innovative computational design and digital fabrication can be used to help create these new micro-industries, as these new technologies bring increased productivity levels with a decreased use of space, which can help empower local craftsman to produce and sell directly to potential consumers through on-demand, micro-manufacturing in small urban workshops which can be easily implanted within the centre.

The workshop will tap into the energy of the emergent gallery-scene of Barra Funda, and the activities of local micro-agencies that plan to use computational technology to introduce a new cultural and economic movement for the centre. The workshop will propose prototype models for micro-industries using computational design and digital fabrication, while participants actually learn and use these technologies, including Rhino, Grasshopper, their related plug-ins, and arduino, as well as the use of the laser-cutter, rapid-prototype machines and CNC routers and mills, to produce 1:1 scale interventions within the city to further promote this new movement. The workshop will be a part of the 2012 International Festival of Electronic Language (F.I.L.E.), an avant-garde exhibition of interactive electronic technology. The workshop will suggest ways these electronic technologies can be imported out of the gallery and into a new cooperative micro-economy of the neighborhood. For this we will work directly with local Barra Funda manufacturers and artists introducing digital technologies to their local fabrication processes, including the Resinfloor Barra Funda small factory, using resin both as a finishing agent as well as within digitally fabricated milled molds, for example, inventing a type of `high-tech/low-tech` liquid fabrication process. The workshop will also collaborate with the local Metamáquina D.I.Y. rapid prototype machine manufacturers, whose goal of diseminating a high-tech, yet  low-cost and small-scale fabrication system, can further promote this micro-industrial movement.

More information and application at: saopaulo.aaschool.ac.uk