KIDS & FAMILIES

Boston’s second annual Inventgenuity Festival (Arlington Center for the Arts, Sunday, March 18, 2012) is presented by Beam Camp, a New Hampshire summer camp for the applied arts, technology and collaboration. The weekend Festival will be loaded with a tremendous range of activities led by Beam’s staff of artists, engineers and big thinkers.

At the Inventgenuity Festival kids will be encouraged to take the place apart piece by piece. As a celebration of design, building, reuse and art, however, they’ll also put it back together again in imaginative ways. The 2012 Inventgenuity Festival will explore DIS/ASSEMBLY with hands-on workshops and on-going collective projects led by expert makers, unmakers and re-makers of sound, electricity, food and objects of all kinds.

Says Beam Co-Director Danny Kahn: “Our goal is to have kids get inside and behind the inner-workings of the systems and structures that surround them. Working with artists and engineers to deconstruct and reinvent is an inspiring way to to start understanding how things really come together.”

The Festival’s big Project, “The Dis/Assembly Line,” is an evolving decomposition and aesthetic reprocessing of an entire room of everyday objects. Kids will join kinetic art mechanic Steve Gerberich as they dissect, sort and reconfigure artifacts into 2D and 3D sculpture. Attendees may also sign-up for one of the rotating slate of 45-minute workshops. Scheduled workshops will explore the Dis/Assembly theme through puppetry, food, electronics, language in 3D (Eun Jung (EJ) Park), craft (Julie Schneider), video , and painting.

Boston Inventgenuity Festival takes place at Arlington Center for the Arts (41 Foster Street, Arlington, MA) on Sunday, March 18 from 11am - 5pm. Festival admission is free, but advance sign-up is required. Required advance registration can be done at http://www.beamcamp.com/inventgenuity. All workshops will repeat throughout the day.

Workshop registration will take place at the Festival. There is a $5 materials charge for some workshops.