Starting from 2012 in summer several hundred people meet in the southwest of Finland every year to gather at NORPAS festival. Starting from last year Tuomo’s and Sari’s culture house project KUBU has firmly established itself as an additional venue for the diverse program and became a remote refuge for local and international artists. NORPAS festival attracts people not only from Kemiö island, but has its fans all over Finland and abroad. This year was my second time to join in.
It seemed quite obvious that while I’m there, Tuomo and I could organize a little workshop right after the festival for those who might be interested in Ohanda One and who are arround for the festival anyways. And hey, it turned out to be a really good idea, since on very short notice we manged to gather a diverse group of people joing in on Tuesday 5th, just the next day after cleaning out the festival.
The group included Johanna Kaakinen, leading the Fostering Finnish Science Capital consortium, who also invited her colleague Aki Koponen, Research Director at the Centre for Collaborative Research (CCR), University of Turku, plus researcher, music-technology practitioner and developer Dominik Schlienger and artist-researcher and educator Jan Schacher from the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, professional carpenter Jussi Puustjärvi and senior IT consultant and political scientist Silke Meyer.
After Tuomo and I had presented the history and status-quo of our speculative design adventure and the existing prototype, we had a great discussion about the various facets of the project. We received very valuable feedback and great inspirations. We were happy to see that many of our fundamental ideas fell into good ground and inspired the participants to join in. That turned out to be especially fruitful, when in the end we invited them to imagine a longer journey on board of Ohanda One and to report back home in a telegram to share their experiences and impressions of the trip. By attentiv listening to each short story we could learn a lot about the shared common ground and where people struck a nerve. I really enjoyed the pleasant and well informed atmosphere. Hopefully there will be more future collaborations!
