REGISTRATION FOR THE 2013 INVENTGENUITY FESTIVAL HAS CLOSED.

Brooklyn’s fourth annual Inventgenuity Festival, presented by Beam Center, fills two large gallery spaces with fun and engaging hands-on activities. With public projects and workshops led by Beam Center’s faculty of artists, engineers and big thinkers, the Inventgenuity Festival has become a popular annual winter celebration of making things for kids and their parents.

At the Inventgenuity Festival, kids will playfully and productively investigate the common DNA digital technology and manual mechanisms. In two days of hands-on workshops and on-going collective projects led by expert makers and manipulators of sound, image, electricity, and motion kids will explore this year’s theme, DIGITAL BY HAND.

Says Beam Center’s Co-Founder Danny Kahn: “We love watching kids jump behind and beyond the screen to discover how the magic is made and meeting the artists and engineers that make it through nothing less than hard work, persistence and imagination. We feel it’s our job, our mission really, to physicalize and make play out of concepts that are generally veiled in mystery and expertise.”

In the weekend’s big Project designed by Allen Riley, “The Physical Video Processing Unit,” kids will become the bits and bytes of a room-sized video machine creating filters and video effects with their bodies and a VHS tape. Participation in the project is free. Attendees may also sign-up for one of the rotating slate of 45-minute workshops. Scheduled workshops will explore DIGITAL BY HAND through animation (Brett Van Aalsburg), sound (Daniel Fishkin), convection (Reid Bingham), electronics (Susan Ngo), handmade motors (Eun Jung Park

Brooklyn Inventgenuity Festival takes place on the third floor of The Invisible Dog Art Center on Saturday, January 26 and Sunday, January 27  from 11am - 5pm. Admission to the festival is free, registration required. Advance online reservations for workshops ($8.25 materials fee) will be available two weeks prior to the Festival. All workshops will repeat throughout the day; most workshops will be available both days of the festival.

The Inventgenuity Festival travels to the Arlington Center for the Arts in Boston March 2 & 3.

ABOUT BEAM CENTER  Beam Center a not-for-profit learning and youth development organization that produces collaborations, mentorships and workshops that bring together young people and master practitioners in applied arts, architecture, building, design, and engineering. Beam Center’s programs include BeamWorks prepares teens for a post-high school world of work and continual learning. Inventgenuity Workshops is an afterschool community of doing and making new space in Brooklyn for kids in grades 2 - 8.