The workshop took place in December 2008 at HyperWerk. Professor Scolari, university of Vic, Spain, conducted a walkaround in the world of semiotics then „new things“ were created based on given cultural objects.

The main activity of the workshop after a conceptual presentation how meaning and behaviour is added to things and how borders and contexts are traversed, was to create new objects working with a limited group of given objects. Thus as implementation of the introduced concepts. Prof. Scolari distributed black boxes. Each one filled with objects belonging to a specific cultural context (IKEA, asian, food, electronic parts, etc.) and the students created new contexts with the objects to demonstrate the transformation of meanings and behaviour. The objective was to reflect on cultural appropriation processes and to participate in a real experience of semiotization of objects from another cultural (semiotic) system.

The key concepts of the workshop were: multiculturality, frontier, translation, cultural conflict, semiotics and semiotization.

The name of the project – “Apollo 13”- is a reference to Ron Howard’s movie (1995). During the A13 crisis in space the astronauts must deal with the heavy carbon dioxide being created in the two-man Aquarius. A quickly assembled engineering team in Houston puts together a crude but effective method to remove the poisonous gas, creating a “mailbox” device that cleans the atmosphere in Aquarius. Following their directions, the crew once again averts danger.

More information about Prof. Scolari: http://hipermediaciones.com/autor/