Rewilding Cultures Mobility: Gemma Ciabattoni at NØ SCHOOL
The Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation aims at initiating conversations on cultural exchange and offers grants for mobility beyond the current forms of support. Amongst the projects of 2025, Gemma Ciabattoni travelled to the NØ SCHOOL in the city of Nevers, France, with the support of Radiona (Croatia). Here is her report.
Gemma Ciabattoni (she/they) is a creative technologist, artist, coordinator, producer, and engineer based in the Netherlands. A naturally precocious person, she has been exploring more of the philosophical and theoretical side of various applications in science and technology. Furthermore, with a background in literature, robotics, and biomechatronics, she has continued to interweave images of the body, mechanics, art, and technology, particularly how we embody those elements while also researching further into mixed modalities and perception through sound, visuals, and tactility. Her curiosity and creative process involves her experimenting with others’ works through workshops and asking questions! Coming from participation in a similarly reputable school, School of Machines, Making, and Make-Believe, where she completed the course, Data Cyborgs: Reconstructing Datafied Relations, she has been working on sharpening her technical skills while looking for new opportunities.
NØ SCHOOL began as an idea from Dasha Ilina and Benjamin Gaulon (aka Recyclism) to promote learning on subjects that are not often taught in academia and caters to participants who want to broaden and improve their technical skills as well as learn about the latest developments in technology and culture. Inviting artists, designers, academics, and makers, NØ SCHOOL offers intensive workshops and evening talks from tutors and participants alike to create a skill-sharing environment for all topics related to art, science, technology, permacomputing, glitch art, among several other scintillating topics.
All roads lead to Nevers?
Following an arguably long stint on a master thesis for a master’s in Interaction Technology, “A Different Kind of Creative Evolution: Exploring the Effect of Virtual Artefacts as a Tool for Creativity with Movement-Based Design Methods and Social VR for Contact Improvisation Dance”, I wanted to keep exploring the various topics I had discovered during this project. From philosophies around body technologies and perception, as well as the technologies themselves both hardware and software, to mixing medias (ie. using equipment intended only for visuals but instead for sound, what I consider “hacking”), there were several directions to go in. It was also my goal to improve my confidence in these fields as someone who feels like a perpetual imposter.
How I discovered NØ SCHOOL remains a mystery to me exactly, but I can say it was uncovered as another consequence of reading about other initiatives, collectives, and/or organizations looking into similar topics, as often is the story with hidden gems. I applied to the school in January 2025 and after being offered a place following an interview, and eventually was able to attend in June-July 2025 with the support of Radiona, Zagreb Makerspace and the Rewilding Cultures mobility grant.
A snapshot of NØ SCHOOL’s workshops
The residency took place in Nevers, France, a small town south of Paris on the Loire river and hosted at Verte Inc. Besides having the enigmatic instructions to bring various miscellaneous items from home and how to transport dirt from our homelands, NØ SCHOOL required little else from its participants in anticipation of its activities; bring your curiosity and playful attitude. Participants had a wide vast number of skills from AI engineering to architecture in both industry and academia.
During the two weeks, we participated in curated workshops around the aforementioned topics so we could dabble in topics in which we had some knowledge or none-what-so-whatever. I wanted to highlight a few that impacted me to explore these concepts more closely, while maintaining that every workshop had a significant impact on the inspiration for where I want to take my research next.
With Terrains Communs, a local initiative in Nevers, we took soil from our home countries or chosen home, in some cases mixing it with soil from the local area to have enough material, to ultimately create a collective artwork. As they share on their own account of this workshop, “The goal of the workshop was to create a collective artwork that reminds us that — wherever we are — we are always walking on shared ground. A gesture of connection, but also of care: acknowledging our responsibility to the soils that sustain us” (Terrains Communs, https://terrainscommuns.org/NO-SCHOOL-25).
After some reflection, I choose to think of this collective artwork as a reflection of all of our backgrounds in the summer school, and also that this time going back to school is also a matter of retracing our steps to what brought us to Nevers. I also think that taking a practice, like chromatography, that requires time and patience, forces you to be slow and be aware of the intricacies in the milieu around you, which is something at least I have taken for granted.
In another workshop, led by the co-director Recyclism, we had the opportunity to deconstruct with some high quality scavenged materials. From old games for Playstationto defunct printers, the only task was to make a custom fidget toy.
I had my eyes set on this part of the printer because once it was removed from the husk, it reminded me of a spine and wind instrument. So, I decided to take the soft buttons off a modern typing machine and place them on the side of the roll unit. Maybe not the most travel-friendly fidget toy, but it definitely kept both hands busy for the time being.
As for the final workshop, in Claire Williams’s “Electromagnetic Walk” workshop, we constructed an antenna from a random assortment of materials, wrapped them in copper wire, and proceeded to solder the main components to create an EMF amplifier, to receive the sounds of the electromagnetic field around us.
Sharing is caring, but make it pink neon and radical!
Besides our workshops, every participant and tutor held a roughly 15-minute talk about their work. Part of what helps with the development of one’s project is also sharing what they have done and learned and where they are curious to go.
Ultimately, I discussed my thesis research, “A Different Kind of Creative Evolution”, for the master’s in Interaction Technology at the University of Twente. The work consisted of creating a virtual world in the social virtual reality (VR) platform, Neos, which was then migrated over to the new platform, Resonite. This virtual world, renamed “Octopus Garden”, contained several interactive components meant to influence two users while they were tasked with performing the specific dance form, contact improvisation. This study looked at what virtual features can stimulate creativity and translate from the virtual to the physical world and in what way do they influence the dancers. The study also looked at the onboarding of dancers before entering virtual reality in a new design framework called Movement-based design methods.
Besides the initial defense, this was the first time I had presented this project to an inter- and transdisciplinary group of creatives. With some participants coming from engineering, it was a great opportunity to share where my background in engineering landed in the art realm and following every talk, we all had a chance to learn a bit more about one another’s motivations and obsessions. Afterwards, I was given several leads on more dance-focused creators in places such as Croatia, Canada, and France.
Where to go from here
My goal in going to NO SCHOOL was also as a means to understand how I could help support other initiatives back home, including Coders Against Genocide (CAG), applying art and technology to activism in the remainder of 2025. So far, I have taken the antenna project and presented it at the Hackfest in Enschede and created a zine detailing how one could make their own antenna, with the aim of calling to question, “what is hacking?”. It was already my plan, after the workshops of hellocatfood and Ted Davis, to create a mixed media interactive game or installation with a similar goal as Terrains Communs, to create a collective piece highlighting one’s surroundings and their interactions with it, perhaps connecting this also to CAG. Many quests pending, but my new target is to repurpose technical applications from what they were originally created to, as Terrains Communs shares, re-sensitize and remind us of our responsibility to the space we share.
NØ SCHOOL is part of Feral Labs Network
Gemma Ciabattoni was mentored by Radiona for this mobility grant