Thursday 19.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
Wireless sensing for creative applications with Pipo Interfaces
Facilitator: Rupert Renevier, Pipo Interfaces

Discover the wireless Pipo sensor family and the story behind its development. This workshop explores how the project came to life, the creative possibilities offered by the sensors, and where the project is heading next. During the hands-on session, participants will learn how to connect to Pipo devices and receive and visualize sensor data.

Thursday 19.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
Everything Is a Sensor – Controlling Digital Systems Without Code
Facilitator: Luke Wilson-Spiro, TroikaTronix

Did you know that what you already have with you, your body, a smartphone, and a laptop, can be used to create a wide range of interactive systems?

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to treat movement, gesture, light, sound, and everyday devices as sources of live data. By capturing and shaping that data, you can build custom controllers for performance and interactive installations without specialized equipment.

Rather than focusing on a single technique, this session introduces a flexible way of thinking: how to translate real-world input into meaningful control. You’ll explore a wide range of approaches using accessible tools, and learn how to connect physical signals to video, lighting, and sound.

Thursday 19.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
Traces of Environments, featuring the X-Modal platorm
Facilitator: Roberto Fusco

What if a room could feel the weather? In Traces of Environments, participants spend an afternoon building a collective installation where the outside world – temperature, wind, cloud cover, the sea, the turn from day to night – flows into the space alongside everyone’s own movement and mark-making. A shared soundscape rises and falls with the room’s activity and the conditions outside it. A painting grows on the wall, drawn by hands and shaped by the same weather. A small sculptural object stirs and glows, tracking it all.

No prior experience is needed – the technical groundwork is already built; what participants shape are the creative decisions: how sensitive, how loud, what color, what movement. By the end of the session the installation runs on its own, left in place for the rest of the festival for other visitors to encounter and, in small ways, continue shaping. Built on X-Modal, an open-source platform for real-time multimodal mapping developed for exactly this kind of participatory, technology-mediated work.

Thursday 19.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
Creating at the Speed of Light
Facilitators: Mirko Siikaluoma and Taina Tossavainen

What can fibre-optic connections make possible for artistic experimentation, collaboration and co-creation across distances? How might ultra-low-latency connections enable new, more sustainable ways of working together when artists, educators and audiences are in different locations?

This workshop explores the creative possibilities of low-latency connectivity through practical pilots and demonstrations from the ANSEL project. Examples include cross-border performances, teacher exchange and music education. Future possibilities, such as collaborative game development and artists working simultaneously across different locations, will also be explored, inspiring participants to consider new applications for these technologies in their own fields.

ANSEL – Access the North with the Speed of Light project (Interreg Aurora 2024-2027) aims to enhance accessibility to cultural expression and education in the sparsely populated regions of Finland, Sweden, and Norway. The project partners are  Centria University of Applied Sciences, Universitetet i Tromsø (Norway), Kaustinen sub-region, Riksteatern (Sweden), Sundsvalls municipality (Sweden), City of Oulu and The Beaivváš Sámi Našunálateáhter (Norway).

Thursday 19.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
Fundamentals of Spatial Narrative Design for XR
Facilitators: Rob Morgan

This workshop will provide a practical grounding in the principles of digital storytelling for the real world. Participants will gain insight into spatial narrative design, and get hands-on with accessible tools to prototype their own story-driven XR experiences. Suitable for all levels of technical ability - including zero!

Thursday 19.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
Survival Kit for More-than-Human Space
Facilitators: Antti Tenetz

What do humans need to survive on Earth, on the Moon or during a long space journey?

This two-hour workshop invites AVARA visitors to create a collective survival kit. Humans do not survive alone: survival depends on other people, living organisms, machines and shared systems of care. Drawing on Tenetz’s research in Perihelion, the workshop begins with an introduction to survival on Earth and in space.

Participants form small groups and choose a question around water, air, food, shelter, communication or care. A short exploration around Lasaretti’s park and river provides photographs, sounds and observations. Back indoors, groups develop responses using tools, microbes, sensors, local knowledge, stories or shared practices.

An AI Survival Agent helps organise contributions and raises questions, while participants decide which suggestions to accept, change or reject. The process explores agency and collective decision-making. The outcome is a collective survival kit. If time allows, groups also map resources, hazards and routes on Earth or another world in the Solar System.

Practical information: Two hours, beginning and ending in a lecture room, with a short outdoor exploration. Bring a charged phone or laptop; devices can be shared. No technical or scientific experience is required. An indoor alternative is available.

Thursday 19.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
Creative Cross-Innovation Session with the ekipengine.eu European Platform and Humak UAS
Facilitators: Marcin Poprawski and Elisa Kraatari (Humak)

ekipengine.eu is the leading EU platform for bridging Cultural and Creative Sectors’ professionals and Innovation Policies. Managed by the Lund University in Sweden, key contributers include partners like the Delft University of Technology (NL), Politecnico di Milano (IT) and from Finland Humak University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki. The latter will host this session that will bring the discussion about the Creative and Cultural Industries (CCI) and Innovation Policies to Avara this year.

CCI is a sector buzzing with creativity, experimentation, and ideas. And yet, it’s regularly misunderstood—particularly when it comes to scalability and integration into mainstream of innovation support instruments. At ekip, we work to embed CCIs into the heart of Europe’s innovation ecosystems as system-shapers, bridge-builders, and policy co-creators. The ekip team is on a mission to make open innovation and cross-innovation elemental ways of working across creative industries and other sectors. But what does that mean? Collaboration is at the core. By bringing together people from different industries,  creativity-led open innovation supports collaboration that helps finding solutions to some of today's biggest challenges.

Creative cross-innovation is an interdisciplinary process in which cultural and creative professionals collaborate with professionals from other fields such as engineering, education, health, or farming in new ways that accelerate transferring knowledge and re-imagining solutions.

The aim of this session is to spark discussion building on the ekip experience of cross-innovation processes in cities and regions together with experts present at the Avara conference. These contributors include CCI professionals, policymakers, intermediaries between CCI organisations and tech companies, and other key sectors who are making a difference on a large scale.

Friday 20.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
Body as Instrument – Building motion-driven interactive installations
Facilitators: Gabor Papp

A hands-on session on turning movement into visual material. We build up a chain: a camera watches a moving body, extracts various motion data, and passes that on to be turned into image. Participants work with a set of prepared examples, adjusting and rearranging them to see immediately how a small adjustment changes the way the space responds to a body.

You will leave understanding how interactive installations are actually assembled from separate pieces that talk to each other, and what separates a system that reacts from one that feels alive. Everything used is free and cross-platform, and you keep the tools afterwards.

No prior experience is required, but a willingness to move, experiment and break things is.

Friday 20.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
The Human Interface – Calibrating Attention, Mapping Inner Space
Facilitator: Chimerik 似不像 

Before we design or interact with technology, how do we tune into the interface through which we experience the world?

Join interdisciplinary artists Sammy and Caroline Chien-MacCaull for a hands-on exploration of the body as our first technology. Drawing on their practice across interactive performance, movement, meditation, and spiritual inquiry, the workshop approaches embodied intelligence through the language of sensors, signals, interfaces, and mapping.

Through guided attention, subtle movement, imaginative spatial mapping, and intuitive writing or drawing, participants explore ways to recalibrate their senses, adjust their internal signal-to-noise ratio, and notice information that habitual thinking may overlook. Working with an imagined inner architecture, they experiment with placing and connecting sensations, memories, and ideas as a way of processing information and opening new creative pathways.

Moving between bodily, imagined, and shared spaces, the workshop invites a shift from the individual “little i” toward a more relational “big I.” Participants explore how sensitivity, discernment, and creative agency can support greater care for the people and environments with whom we create.

Friday 20.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
What can smartphones reveal about acting? Virtual masks: algorithm enhancing the performer body
Facilitator: Davide Giovanzana

This workshop examines how augmented reality (AR) face filters can be used as virtual masks in actor training, combining theatre pedagogy and artistic experimentation. Inspired by traditional mask work, particularly commedia dell’arte, AR filters are explored as performative tools that extend the actor’s body and encourage the embodiment of fictional archetypes.

Participants first attune their bodies to a virtual face and then engage in improvisation using their whole body and voice while observing themselves through digital devices. The workshop investigates how the interaction between the physical stage and the virtual screen influences embodiment, imagination, and performance.

The theoretical discussion focuses on the relationship between technology and imagination in acting. It questions whether digital acting should be viewed merely as a technical tool or as a catalyst for new theatrical practices and paradigms. The workshop also introduces concepts such as object, subject, and abject technologies (Jennifer Parks-Starbuck) and techno-imagination (Vilém Flusser).

Friday 20.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
Performing Stories through Networked Live Animation and Sound
Facilitator: Iannis Zannos

This hands-on workshop explores how everyday digital technology can connect bodies, stories and communities. Using an ordinary laptop webcam and open-source tools, participants learn how to capture, edit and play back their own movements, animate virtual characters, and combine live performance with recorded motion. The workshop also introduces the use of performers’ movements to control sound generation, enabling participants to accompany bodily movement with sound.

Working in small groups, participants use these techniques to create and present a short animated story through their own bodies. The story may begin with a personal idea, a poem or literary text, or a narrative drawn from Finnish, Sámi or other local traditions. Participants are equally welcome to bring material from their own languages and cultures. Examples drawn from Greek and Japanese poetry will be provided as creative starting points.

Friday 20.11.2026 at 14:15 p.m.
From Audience to Co-Creators – Designing Spaces People Can Belong To
Facilitator: Chiara Mastino

What changes when we stop thinking of people as users or audiences and begin considering them as participants in the creation of a space? This collaborative workshop invites participants from art, culture, technology and research to design new forms of physical, digital or hybrid cultural experiences.

Participants will work in interdisciplinary teams around concrete exhibition and cultural-space challenges. Rather than beginning with a technology, each group will begin with people, knowledge and context. They will identify what needs to be communicated, what limitations currently exist, what role visitors should have, what technology could meaningfully contribute and what should deliberately remain non-technological.

The purpose is not to design the most technologically advanced solution. The purpose is to design the most meaningful one. At the end of the workshop, each group will present a concept for a physical, digital or hybrid space. The final discussion will compare the different approaches and identify principles that can be transferred into participants' own projects.