Filtered by: workshop
Extratonal Education #10: Touching Music / Knowing Music - Using Access as a Creative Tool
Saturday, September 19, 2026
This workshop aims to explore how music can be experienced beyond the ears—through touch, vibration, movement, and the body. By combining Ali Robertson’s experience as a Neurodiverse, partially deaf and untrained musician with new approaches to tactile sound, we will aim to create music together that is accessible, engaging, and meaningful across diverse abilities.
A Matter of Listening: sound mapping workshop
Saturday, July 4, 2026
A workshop for listening to Charlois through its overlooked acoustic niches, and mapping the city through the sounds of non-human life, infrastructure, and interference.
Greetings to AI Crawlers
Saturday, June 13, 2026
How can we protect our websites from data scraping by tech giants?
Extratonal Eduation #9 - Band on the spot: Jamming as art methodology
Thursday, June 11, 2026
This workshop will make a welcoming space for FLINTA to jam and improvise.
Luddites Anon
Saturday, May 9, 2026
This workshop is for anyone interested/concerned/curious about how modern technologies impact our day to day experiences.
Moving Fragments
Friday, May 1, 2026
Moving Fragments: Visualising your inner message through collage making is a feminist poster making workshop by Yen Yi Lee.
Colonial Infrastructures #6: Resisting Knowledge Erasure, with Learning Palestine
Saturday, April 18, 2026
As part of the Colonial Infrastructures series, this 6th edition will focus on knowledge under duress and its circulation in times of repression. How do we gather to disseminate knowledge that was erased and dispersed? Considering destruction and censorship as acts of colonial force, Resisting Knowledge Erasure will focus on efforts of circulating knowledge via shadow libraries, fugitive archives, infoshop repositories, and other unsanctioned collections.
Extratonal Ecuation #8: Envisioning Online interfaces
Saturday, April 4, 2026
During this workshop we will take a deep dive into existing online audio platforms, such as Soundcloud, Spotify and Bandcamp. While listening and sharing each other's music or sounds, we imagine an online community of enjoying each others sound files and sharing the process of their making. A community for listening to each other through tender ears and curiosity.
Biocraft with household organic waste. Make, shape, grow.
Sunday, January 18, 2026
A workshop turning household organic waste into fungus powered biobased stuff.
B(r)oilerplates for Fictionality
Saturday, January 17, 2026
In the third installment of ‘B(r)oilerplates for Fictionality’, we turn our attention to the fictive in relation to poetry. Our guest Çağlar Köseoğlu will guide this session through the work of Lebanese-American poet and artist Etel Adnan. A central point of reference will be *The Arab Apocalypse*, Adnan’s poetic response to war and imperial violence, which continues to resonate amid the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
Biocraft with household organic waste. Make, shape, grow.
Sunday, January 11, 2026
A workshop turning household organic waste into fungus powered biobased stuff.
Colonial Infrastructures #5
Sunday, November 30, 2025
As part of the Colonial Infrastructures series, this 5th edition will focus on knowledge under duress and its circulation in times of repression. How do we gather to disseminate knowledge that was erased and dispersed? Considering destruction and censorship as acts of colonial force, Resisting Knowledge Erasure will focus on efforts of circulating knowledge via shadow libraries, fugitive archives, infoshop repositories, and other unsanctioned collections.
London Permacomputing Club: Literate Programming Workshop
Sunday, November 23, 2025
During this session we will discuss the role of code as a tool for communicating methodology to human audiences. Through practices of Literate Programming and explanatory storytelling, we will explore the forms of the 'repair manual' and the relationships we form with our functional possessions.
Extratonal Education #8: Cozy Pillows
Friday, November 21, 2025
Come and learn how to make cozy pillows with Riccardo Santalucia, using hand crochet techniques - no hooks required - and sharing stories in the process. If you’ll make more than one pillow, consider donating it to Varia for a great cause
B(r)oilerplates for Fictionality
Saturday, November 15, 2025
Horta in the Dark is a speculative writing workshop inspired by the Star Trek episode Devil in the Dark. Together with Marjolein van der Loo, we’ll explore how empathy and imagination can bridge encounters with the non-human.
Self-Medicated Practices
Sunday, November 9, 2025
The second public moment of this research thread will focus on (mostly Western) herbalism—the rootstock of what we now call conventional medicine. For this event we invite the Garage School of Medicine.
Biocraft with household organic waste
Saturday, November 8, 2025
In this session, we will talk about the human-centered specificities and differences between initiatives doing stuff with technology (gossip, folklore, craft, aesthetics, scenes). In order to discuss them we propose a plastic-fictional etymology of these 5 words as a game to explore and map the multiple natures of 'doing things with technology'.
Doodle Dabble Emo-Pancake Brunch
Saturday, November 1, 2025
Join Doodle Dabble for a brunch and have a bunch of fun making delicious emo-pancakes!
TROPICAL MORDOR
Sunday, October 26, 2025
**A MICROFESTIVAL** of tropico-digital fever dreams, unpacked. **A LECTURE** by journalist Alan Robles on the underdocumented microhistories of how the Philippines shaped the world's digital culture wars. **A MONSTERCLASS** on troll hunting—for femmebots only—facilitated by Alan and Clara Balaguer. **A GIFT SHOPPE** for revolutionary merch and other publishing rarities from JMS Legacy Foundation and comrades. **AND MERYENDA** brought to you by post-colonial hospitality culture.
B(r)oilerplates for Fictionality
Saturday, October 11, 2025
In this session, we will talk about the human-centered specificities and differences between initiatives doing stuff with technology (gossip, folklore, craft, aesthetics, scenes). In order to discuss them we propose a plastic-fictional etymology of these 5 words as a game to explore and map the multiple natures of 'doing things with technology'.
Pibliothèque workshops
Saturday, September 20, 2025
For 2 days, Lionel Maes and the research group Les nouveaux habits du colportage (Alexia de Visscher, Alice Néron, Léonard Mabille) will be running a workshop on an offline, local and collaborative tool of sharing digital books
After Summer School @ Varia
Friday, September 19, 2025
Join the After Summer School 2025! During theAfter Summer School (18–21 September) over 20 public classes will take place throughout Rotterdam, presenting the city as a hub for knowledge that deserves to berecognized and included in the city development. How can we change the city by looking,listening, writing, archiving, collaborating, activating, researching, designing, and walking differently?
Vakbond Precaire Netwerken
Sunday, September 7, 2025
VPN is an apprenticeship-based technology school for radical organizers. It offers an IT curriculum to otherwise underserved communities and organizations advancing social justice causes. We train politically self-motivated individuals who aim to set up and maintain digital infrastructure for themselves and their communities. We stand for direct action and mutual-aid, to end our dependence on technology monopolies. We work in the here and now towards a grassroots alternative for digital technology and society.
Free your e-reader!
Sunday, June 15, 2025
A calm, friendly workshop about jailbreaking your e-reader, a way to remove restrictions and take back some control over a device you already own.
Extratonal Education #7: Voicing Complexities
Sunday, June 1, 2025
The workshop is a public moment of the artistic research "Voicing complexities", which questions gender classifications through sound. As a starting point, we will listen to public sound libraries and data sets. We will observe their categorisations and the narratives they reinforce. Later, together with Mitsitron and Ester Venema, in a safer facilitated space, we will record (our own) sounds of exclusion
Self-medicated practices DIY devices
Sunday, May 18, 2025
In this session, we will look into DIY methods of making medical tools more accessible, demystify the way they work, make it easy to repair and source materials and keep track of data for personal use.
Marginalia
Saturday, May 10, 2025
Join us for a workshop on writing in the margins using Marginalia an open-source and free, collaborative article annotation and publishing platform. This platform foregrounds non-linear, messy, entangled knowledge creation using annotations, hyperlinks, scribbles, and more. It is for those seeking online space for communal learning, wild experiments in reading and writing, and intervening into the text to make room for themselves in it. The workshop will be led by Arran Lyon, a creative technologist/coder, computer scientist, hacker and Senka Milutinović, a designer, researcher, writer. Both are a part of the ARK collective and have an interest in storytelling and knowledge creation with technology.
Doodle Dabble 2025
Saturday, May 3, 2025
Doodle Dabble is back! With story books, casset tapes, and a recorder!
Extratonal Special #5: Multispecies Festival
Friday, April 25, 2025
How do flowers, plants and animals think about karaoke, ceramics and newspapers? During this two-day multispecies festival, the platform for extratonality explores different ways to give other species a place within the creative field.
Colonial Infrastructures: Hair as Global Commodity with Yi Zhang and Bo Wang
Saturday, April 19, 2025
During this Colonial Infrastructures worksession we will continue investigate systems of commodity, processes of labour and assembly, and global import-export relationships through the intimate object of hair.
A Color With A Body And A Place with Karla Claudio
Sunday, April 6, 2025
Boricua artist Karla Claudio hosts a talk, film screening and workshop about Caribbean dye plants and their colonial histories.
Social in the Media get together
Friday, February 7, 2025
If in the light of recent events, you've been curious to look into alternative social media that doesn't run on an ad-based model, or is a big-tech owned walled garden, or if you are curious to meet other people who have accounts on the fediverse and beyond, please feel welcome to join us on the 7th of February where we'll explore some alternatives to dominant social media and get started sharing in a more convivial manner.
Investigative Journalism workshop
Sunday, December 15, 2024
This workshop will begin with a presentation by Naima Cornelia on the methods behind the story, what questions to ask, where to find those answers, and how. and then a hands-on session where we will discuss different ways to tackle a research question. We start by seeing what information we can find online, try some google-search techniques, see what we can dig up and go from there.
Declarations Pen Pals
Friday, December 6, 2024
Dear CSS writers, web-artisans and declarative artists, Declarations is organising its first meetup at Varia in Rotterdam. Declarations is an ongoing artistic research project into the poetic materiality of the CSS web-standard and its echoes on design and artistic practices. For that occasion we decided to focus two days on CSS inside emails.
Miscalculating Risk: Supermarket Surveillance
Sunday, November 17, 2024
In continuation of the Miscalculating Risk
Listening To The Cracks
Saturday, October 26, 2024
"Listening to the Cracks" is a research project that explores the often-inaudible sounds of urban nature. Together with Matthias Hurtl and Yoana Buzova, participants will engage in a listening session in Gouwplein, Oud-Charlois, to uncover voices and frequencies that are typically overlooked or dismissed as nuisances.
Track, Manage, Store?
Sunday, September 29, 2024
This workshop is a point of entry into a broader discussion looking towards new tech that is making it ever more simple and accessible to 'capture nature in a single click'. During the workshop we will explore digital conservation techniques and their impact, while considering how digital conservation techniques might shape the future landscape.
Miscalculating risk: Policing Technologies in the Netherlands
Friday, July 12, 2024
In light of the increasing use of data-driven policing technologies, how can we understand and find ways to address the impact of their deployment? As surveillance technologies become more and more entangled in everyday life, what are our possibilities of response? Who or what are the key players in these considerations? Sanne Stevens and Jair Schalkwijk will join us to unpack these questions.
Doodle Dabble
Friday, May 24, 2024
Doodle Dabble is a workshop for children to dip their toes in the pond of Varia. It is an invitation to observe and jump in different puddles of the space. Let's move our bodies, play games, and doodle around! As part of Varia's Accessibility Seed research thread, Varia is opening its space with an intention to learn from children how they intuitively find their ways to access spaces and reside in multi-language situations with playful manner. Happening every last Saturday of the month, it is one of the three repeating workshop series (25th May, 29th June, 27th July) with a guest artist Chaeyoung Kim.
Extratonal Education #5: Undead Printer Hacking Workshop
Saturday, April 20, 2024
In this workshop, we explore the inner workings of printers. With a DIY and DIWO approach and by hacking and modifying obsolete printers we find different uses and meanings for them. Is there a printing beyond having driver problems? Can we repurpose e-waste printers in something beyond frustration?
Extratonal Education #4: Live coding jam session with Mitsitron & Magda Arques
Friday, April 19, 2024
Live coding jam session is a performative evening to experiment with live coding together.
Semi-True Interpretation of Fictionality (Series)
Saturday, March 23, 2024
This is the first of three installments wherein we would love to collectively explore 'fictionality'. Coming from fiction, becoming adjective and then noun again, what could fictionality mean? Why and how does this notion continue to be relevant in our contemporary times of post-truth, post-facts and widespread anecdotal questioning of scientific knowledge? What kind of imaginary power does fictionality have? And how could engaging with the porous space between fiction and non-fiction help to envision other kinds of presents and futures?
Extratonal Education #3: Oud-Charlois PCB-Dérive
Saturday, February 24, 2024
This workshop deals with the discarded electrical junk of the residents of Oud Charlois. Together we will search through the garbage on the streets to filter out the electronic waste!
Digital Discomfort: Read-Write-Chaos
Friday, January 19, 2024
The Digital Discomfort Working Group proposes a one-day gathering to collectivelly engage with the questions and praxis of discomfort aesthetics as a potential form of contemporary (techno)political resistance.
HTML Zine Club
Saturday, November 11, 2023
HTML Zine Club is a workshop making a personal-scope of web publication. Webzines, like print zines, are personal, story-based publications, but can also be made interactive and nonlinear through code, using basic programming languages such as HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript (if you like!). In this workshop, an artist Nami Kim will lead participants who have little to no coding experience on how to craft their own webzines, centred around programming with care.
Extratonal Education #2: Demystifying the Æther with Matthias Hurtl (MTHS)
Friday, October 13, 2023
During the second edition of the Extratonal Education workshop series, we explore the world of electromagnetic waves and their ubiquity in our lives, together with Mathias Hurtl (MTHS). After being introduced to special hardware and Software Defined Radio, participants will acquire radio signals from different frequency bands. The workshop is free; afterwards there is a vegan dinner.
Gardening as Electricity Making
Saturday, June 24, 2023
We invite you to 'Gardening as Electricity Making', a workshop that celebrates the interplay of soil, electricity, life, and the internet.
COVERT TECHNOLOGIES #1: FOAMING
Sunday, June 4, 2023
a drag workshop w/ Anne Ampersand | Marko Gutić Mižimakov
Extratonal Education #1: SuperCollider Audio Synthesis Workshop with Kauê Werner
Saturday, May 27, 2023
In the first edition of the Extratonal Education workshop series Kauê Werner will give an introduction to sound synthesis with the programming language SuperCollider. No previous knowledge is necessary! Just show up with a laptop & headphones and have fun. The workshop is free and after the workshop there will be a free vegan dinner.
Sharing Programming Knowledge with Kit Kuksenok
Saturday, April 1, 2023
In this workshop, Kit draws on their research in software engineering education and experience in technical pedagogy to host a space to share experiences of how we navigate programming knowledge. They ask
care for code - documentation session
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Let's write some code documentation! For your new coding project, for the cryptic library you downloaded recently, for a script that you want to share with others! Enter the documentation sessions. Two hours where to sit with source code and write something about it.
Remnants of Future Voices
Saturday, December 10, 2022
In this workshop we will explore ancestral cosmology through the figure of the clone in artificial voice technologies. The workshop will experiment with artistic approaches to future and past-oriented dialogues using voice avatars of ourselves and others, considering the implications of creating a clone that may speak to generations beyond our own lifetime and say things we have never said.
Push to Talk Partyline
Thursday, December 8, 2022
During a 3-day hands-on workshop we'll investigate license-free radio as a low-tech and low-power medium for keeping in touch with each other. We want to look at radio as a medium that you can participate in instead of consuming it. We'll explore the aspects of locality and community present in radio.
Plaintext Protocol Partyline
Friday, September 16, 2022
On the Friday the 16th and Saturday the 17th of September 2022, we are hosting the Plaintext Protocol Partyline, in which we will explore and experience plaintext protocols as a communication medium.
Feminist Hack Meetings #6 - How about access?
Saturday, June 4, 2022
This FHM session is for us to reconsider the accessibility of online realms. We will learn about this in two parts, first through a guest talk from artist-design duo MELT, who will share their research and practice around accessibility.
DAAP x Varia public workshop
Sunday, May 29, 2022
Join us for an open and free workshop on Sunday, May 29th 11am–4pm, at Varia and learn more about the Digital Archive of Artists' Publishing and how you can start using this resource, too!
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers (radio broadcast)
Saturday, March 26, 2022
*A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers* (ATNOFS) is a collaborative project of Varia, LURK, Constant, HYPHA, Feminist Hack Meetings and ESC formed around intersectional feminist, ecological servers. In the first session at Varia during the weekend of March 26 and 27, we will focus on tools and methods to make space for understanding what feminist publishing infrastructures could be.
'Dear [neutral] language, (...)'
Saturday, December 4, 2021
In this worksession WordMord will present their investigations of how coding can destabilise traumatic language. The group has also invited Allisson Parrish to conduct the workshop 'Creative Writing with Computers, Noise and Mulch'.
pad-publishing @ zine camp
Sunday, November 7, 2021
During this workshop we will experiment with models of resonant publishing using Etherpad and web2print techniques, in which actions of writing, processing and lay-out making continuously cross each other.
Feminist Hack Meetings #3 - Feminist Futurotopixs: inventing feminist technologies
Saturday, November 6, 2021
Spideralex will introduce us to Feminist Futurotopixs. This workshop will enable participants to dream, invent and desire together feminist technologies. They will invent narratives, speculative fiction and radical imaginaries that work as alternatives to existing oppressive or dystopian models. The workshop is oriented at co-designing stories and creating new worlds as processes to imagine and dream together about feminist desired futures.
Feminist Hack Meetings #2 - Polyphonic Radio Ensemble
Saturday, July 24, 2021
Let's create a radiophonic piece together! Reni Hofmüller will introduce us to radio and the idea of catching the waves artistically and technically. We invite you to join a radio improvisation work, by using and adapting the time- and material structuring method of the Polyphonic Ensemble. Through this collective radio work, we will engage with a techno-feminist approach.
Digital Solidarity Networks - How can we rethink digital infrastructures in terms of capacity and care?
Thursday, June 10, 2021
Notions of scale, usability, collectivity and agency play an important role in generating possibilities for technological self-determination in an attempt to imagine computational infrastructures differently. How can we imagine technological attitudes that don't rely on data extractivist models? How do we make space to reconsider the figure of the user? And what if digital tools can be adapted to the specificities of each situation? For the third event, we will be joined by TITiPi (Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard) who will speak about infrabels.
Digital Solidarity Networks - What are lessons learned from alternative, decentralised or federated infrastructures?
Thursday, May 27, 2021
Notions of scale, usability, collectivity and agency play an important role in generating possibilities for technological self-determination in an attempt to imagine computational infrastructures differently. How can we imagine technological attitudes that don't rely on data extractivist models? How do we make space to reconsider the figure of the user? And what if digital tools can be adapted to the specificities of each situation? For the second event, we will be joined by LURK (represented by Aymeric Mansoux and Roel Roscam Abbing) who will speak about lessons learned from alternative, decentralised or federated networks.
Digital Solidarity Networks - How can we reconfigure digital networks across timelines and communities?
Thursday, May 20, 2021
Notions of scale, usability, collectivity and agency play an important role in generating possibilities for technological self-determination in an attempt to imagine computational infrastructures differently. How can we imagine technological attitudes that don't rely on data extractivist models? How do we make space to reconsider the figure of the user? And what if digital tools can be adapted to the specificities of each situation? In this presentation, Dušan Barok will briefly discuss their genealogies, varieties and dilemmas.
Plaintext Partyline
Saturday, May 8, 2021
On May 8 (Saturday) & May 9 (Sunday), Plaintext Partyline explores the modest space of the rigid X-Y axis of plaintext. Varia members and friends spend a weekend exploring this old, but not old-fashioned technology. Various outcomes will be presented online and in the windows of Varia.
FHM #1 - Feminist Servers: Backups, migrations, and other painful stories
Saturday, March 13, 2021
The work session focuses on the migration of mailing lists between an old and a new server ran by feminists involved in the Systerserver project. The work session is co-hosted together with [Mara](https://psaroskalazines.gr/) and is made up of two parts. The first part is a technical hands-on backup/migration process and the second is a discussion around the connections between feminist servers and the travel path of this migration.
Feminist Hack Meetings
Saturday, January 25, 2020
The Feminist Hack Meetings are a series of informal research meetings and workshops that aim to explore the suggestions, urgencies and potentials of feminist hack & tech initiatives.
Floppy Totaal
Saturday, October 19, 2019
Floppy Totaal visits Varia for another round of dual-layered action. At 'Floppy Totaal: Double Density' you can join members of the Floppy Kick music label during a live recording and publishing workshop in the afternoon. The subsequent evening program is filled to the brim with performances by Kisszántó and Eoforwine, presentations and conversations with Joak and Jason Scott and a long distance contribution by Michael Ridge.
Bibliotecha, building and maintaining an off-line digital library
Saturday, July 6, 2019
Bibliotecha is a toolkit to maintain local off-line digital libraries. With it, communities can create and share collections of digital publications in their local area. Technically Bibliotecha relies on a small single board computer (such as a RaspberryPi) running free and open source software to serve digital publications on an open Wi-fi hotspot. Using a laptop, phone or tablet visitors can connect to it and books can be retrieved or donated via the browser. Since it is a low-power device you can power it with a USB powerbank and take it with you everywhere.
Relearn 2019 curved
Friday, June 7, 2019
This year's edition of Relearn takes the form of multiple sessions, spread over the (bezier) curve between (possibly Amsterdam)-Rotterdam-Brussels-Paris. This Relearn session in Rotterdam is the first control point on the curve.
Dear Cultural Intitiative, there is an Elephant in the Room
Friday, April 12, 2019
Addressing our digital dependencies as self-organised spaces.
Welcome to the � Federation - Mastodon and The Fediverse
Saturday, December 8, 2018
What could community-owned social media look like? A public Wtt�F discussion on Mastodon, the Fediverse and translations.
Woodstone Kugelblitz: Druk in Varia
Friday, November 23, 2018
Some things are more useful to know than others.
RecycleReduceReuse and where is Repair Workshop (full)
Thursday, November 22, 2018
Over the last couple of centuries rapid changes in technology, economic fluctuation, technological replacement and planned obsolescence have resulted in a fast-growing surplus of (electronic) waste around the globe. An equally growing demand has risen for the re-purposing, repair, disposal and salvaging of this material, generating different methods that each have their own impact on the economy and environment.
Inter-Planetary File System unearthed
Thursday, November 1, 2018
During this workshop, we will look at the successes, the pitfalls and the potential of this protocol. We will install it, go through the basics, discuss how it differs from other P2P protocols like dat and what types of usage it enables.
In the Beginning ... Was the Commandline
Thursday, October 18, 2018
In this workshop we will focus on command line tools in relation to plain text. During the day we will dive into the social-cultural history of the command line interface, explore the materiality of plain text on a computer and discover a wide range of command line tools.
Considerate Cake Confection (full)
Thursday, October 11, 2018
In our understanding, food as a commodity finds its most revealing expression in the form of the cake. In this workshop we investigate the history of culinary hegemony by collectively baking a specific sweet recipe that showcases the way we perceive and partake in food today. Not only will we be analysing the origins of specific ingredients and recipes, we will also focus on the political economy and class dynamics that engender taste and ingredient accessibility. The actual confection of this cake will provide us with an opportunity to hack into the requirments involved in such practices and turn the table around.
Welcome to the � Federation - The Ecosystem is Moving
Friday, June 1, 2018
On the 1st and 2nd of June varia will host 'The Ecosystem Is Moving', a lecture by and worksession with Daniel Gultsch about federated instant messaging, open source software and the sustainability of open systems.
Wojtek Szustak - Space Junk Workshop
Friday, May 18, 2018
Wojtek Szustak is an electronic intermedialist from Krakow who works with and around music and space junk. In preparation of 'Infinite Outwardness' he will conduct a synthesizer junk workshop at Varia where we will make new electronic instruments from old rubbish we find on the streets of Charlois.
homebrewserver.club: calendars session 2
Thursday, November 30, 2017
A second gathering around self-hosted calendars.
homebrewserver.club: calendars session 1
Thursday, November 16, 2017
A first gathering around self-hosted calendars.
homebrewserver.club
Saturday, October 14, 2017
A monthly gathering for those who (wish to) host their own online services from home, rather than using commercial and privacy unfriendly alternatives.
Relearn Rotterdam
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Relearn is a collective learning experiment with as many teachers as it has participants. It is motivated by the possibility to displace parameters of/for research, studying and learning.