Photo by Tom Spray
"I need to be a hamster!" Robyn yells across a packed hall. Here, at the kick-off of Tekla, the free one-day tech conference that the Swedish pop star has helped organize for 200 teenage girls, she is merely a hamster seeking her other hamsters. As an ice-breaking exercise, the girls have been divided up into animal groups and tasked with creating a new noise that their animal (or jellyfish) makes. Robyn joins the hamsters and they studiously discuss how it should sound; minutes later the room is an orchestra of shrieks, caws and stamped feet.
Aged 11 to 18, these girls are the lucky 200 to be selected (carefully, to ensure diversity) out of the 2000 that applied for the inaugural Tekla festival, which Robyn designed to introduce girls to the creative possibilities of technology, in association with Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). In September 2013, KTH awarded Robyn their Great Prize, which recognizes groundbreaking contributors to "Sweden’s continued material progress." Staging a seminar for the university’s students is a condition of acceptance, "but it just felt more interesting to do something that was more practical," says Robyn. "Lina [Thomsgård, publicist/right-hand woman] and I talked about this directive that KTH got through the government to try and get more girls into programs at KTH, and we just thought, why not do something for the future students of the school?"
-=-=-=-Robyn’s first collaboration with KTH came back in March 2013, after she agreed to participate in their "robot project," where students built a robotic tribute to the Swedish popstar. To help shape its aesthetic—and avoid the one-dimensional, precision-tooled beauty of most female cyborgs—she gave them a book about the Apollo moon landing, describing it, as engineer Elias Josefsson relayed to Wired, as "an example where something is not designed with a fancy cover, but instead the rawness can be beautiful with all the necessary parts visible." That works as a guiding principle for Tekla, too, which was conceived to highlight tech’s creative real-world application, to enable girls to make the connection between surface and software.
"To understand that you can influence things," says project manager Paulina Modlitba-Söderlund, a KTH-educated scientist. "That if you learn how to do it, you can build your own Instagram if you’re not happy with the one you’re using. I think there’s something magical there—flipping girls’ mindsets and making them understand that there are endless possibilities."
Fatuza, who is 13, is excited by today’s video game creation workshop. "They have lots of games for boys," she says, eye-rolling. "I would make a game that makes girls more interested in playing. The girls in Grand Theft Auto can’t help themselves, they are just getting killed, and I think that’s unfair." Ebba, 11, doesn’t like Minecraft’s pre-programmed cities, and wants to learn to use her raspberry pi processor to code them to her own spec. There are also workshops in robotics, music production, 3D printing, hacking, and online privacy; girls can learn to make APIs with Spotify (whose HQ is a few blocks away) and get an introduction to virtual reality from Google. "They were designed not to let adults in, so the girls feel like they’re in charge," says Robyn.
The day kicks off with a performance from Zhala (Rifat), the first artist to be signed to Robyn’s Konichiwa Records. Her three-song performance is the perfect representation of this real-world possibility: she plays backing tracks of jagged electronica influenced by her Kurdish heritage through her laptop and triggers a mini smoke machine in between songs. "She does a lot of her own programming," Robyn explains. "She’s more technologically advanced than I am."
"I got my first computer when I was 22, and I’m 27 now," Zhala says afterwards. "I’ve always been doing music, but it’s always been around guys." Tired of relying on experienced men to help her filter and warp her art, she taught herself to program using YouTube Ableton tutorials, "to be able to express the exact vision I have. I knew that I had my own language, it’s very important that I get to express that."
Robyn’s publicist Lina Thomsgård says Tekla became about creating space for girls to explore interests on their terms. Ellen, 13, describes how at school, "with stuff like programming and computers, the teacher often turns it to the boys, and me and my friends are like, we also want to do it." She calls herself a feminist, but, "after this, I might be even more girl power! Sometimes I get so sad when, like—a teacher was going to carry a table and she [asks], ‘Is there a strong guy who can help me with this?’ And then she stopped and said, ‘Oh, but of course a girl can too.’ Can’t she just say, ‘Can someone do it?’ It’s just something that sits in you, you learn that it is like that without even thinking about it."
For Robyn, making Tekla girls-only was about seeing "what happens when there are no boys in the room—maybe a girl decides that she wants to play the drums, and she wouldn’t if there was a boy there. A different dynamic happens, it frees the situation from some restrictive behaviors for girls. We’re rarely in a girl group when we just allow each other to play around and try stuff." She didn’t have a gateway to this arena as a kid, but "my parents used to have a theater group and they were on stage a lot, so that became something un-dramatic for me. I think that’s what it’s about—when you develop an interest, it usually comes from an environment that de-dramatizes things. Because then you’re able to find your own entrance into it."
Popkollo runs a dozen music camps for teen girls around Sweden every summer, with rock, metal and hip-hop courses offered. Over the course of the 10-day programs, co-founder Hannah Rothelius says they witness a huge difference in the campers. "They’re usually pretty shy and not used to getting a space of their own, and getting wild and crazy and being creative, without feeling watched or judged—it’s amazing."
By the end of the day, all that’s left of Tekla will be some helium balloons collected in the rafters of KTH’s student union, but the festival has been designed to leave a lasting impact. While the girls move between workshops, some parents sit through seminars designed to familiarize them with various aspects of tech so that they might better understand and encourage their daughters’ newfound interests. "We hope it will become an annual event, and I think 200 girls is too few," says KTH dean Sophia Hober. Fostering community is important: Robyn introduced KTH and Popkollo, and soon, all three parties will be pioneering a scheme to get girls and women into studios and provide year-long mentoring programs.
The day’s immediate results are thrilling too, though. Following a presentation from Spotify’s global VP of design and user experience Rochelle King, the students from Popkolla’s programming workshop present their songs: the first has the mutated bass and dragged jaw drawl of Dean Blunt, while the second is more kinetic, a Rustie-ish chiptune rendering of an emptying drain. Then there’s "danceoke", which flips through Beyoncé, Janelle Monáe, '80s aerobics videos, Bikini Kill, and Robyn’s "Call Your Girlfriend". The lights flash and there she is, wearing pastel-pink silk boxing gear. She sings three brand new songs (which got live debuts on last year’s tour with Röyksopp) about freedom and uncontainable physical self-expression. "Work it out shake your body ‘til you break yeah you got to work it out," she urges on the first, a steely, stuttering electropop number; the next song is a shimmying dancehall-house hybrid where she raps about the autonomy of desire: "I’mma give it to you baby/ Some light some heavy/ You can’t control it/ You can’t unfold it."
"One more song about freedom," she says before the last song, a pounding rave number with a touch of warm Donna Summer transcendence. DJ Lap-See follows, though the room empties rapidly as the students are lured elsewhere by free popcorn and goodie bags. One girl remains though, pop-locking effortlessly alone in the middle of the room. Once she realizes people are watching, she picks up her pink fun-fuzz satchel and walks off.
