Flex — Workshop

Aboard the Villa — véhicule d’arts actuels et numériques, the interdisciplinary artist and composer Sonia Paco-Rocchia offers an sound and visual experience that allows participants to make a series of sound robots, each of which play a different, customized score. Sound robots are made with recycled materials and automated with a motor, a circuit and a sensor. Their creation gives a sneak peak into electronics, digital programming, and kinetic and sound art. Both workshops cover the construction of instruments, the programming of digital modules and musical improvisation. Participants are free to take what they’ve made with them at the end of the workshop.

In her career as a composer, Sonia Paco-Rocchia could not help noticing how she was working within a majority male environment. As a making of all her own instruments, her work is simultaneously manual, musical and electronic. By offering her workshops to young adult women, the artist hopes to use creation, and the encounters it makes possible, to spark dialogues about how best to tap the potential of those present. It’s also the artist’s way of sharing her own “atypical” trajectory, which shows well how our convictions have the power to affect change in our lives.