Public Workshops
As part of a public infrastructure, Angela YT Chan and Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina led a series of communal, creative, and investigative workshops connected to the meeting space at John Hansard Gallery. Thinking about what voices are heard in public spaces, the workshops were framed as street games that allowed participants to treat urban space as their own, and to document and trace technologies, sound, and space.
Conversations Over the Map drew on embroidery and sewing as traditional arts of care and repair. Participants collectively embroidered a textile map of Southampton while discussing public access to technology in their neighbourhoods and asking who provides care and support when infrastructures fail.
Mapping Public Infrastructures: Your Neighbourhood invited participants to build paper-based maps exploring their connections to neighbourhood and community through technology and place. It asked how publicly accessible the ways we use technology in the city are, and what would strengthen an infrastructure to feel like their neighbourhood’s own.
Light On Data invited participants to play with light to tell stories about technology and personal data. Through collaging, writing, drawing, and designing torchlight filters, the workshop explored emerging technologies and surveillance, and shone light on civic resistance in the city.
Investigating Climate and Technology explored how technology is framed in the climate crisis, both as a fix and as a source of material impact on people and the planet. The workshop mapped connections between consumption, politics, urgent climate impacts, and fast-evolving technological innovations.
The workshops contributed recordings, embroideries, images, sounds, and other materials to the evolving installation, while creating space to learn together about the technologies and infrastructures around us.