Retrospective on the Holiday Pass Workshop: Use Ladders and Slides to navigate the City of the Future
A huge cardboard city towers in the middle of the room. In every corner, children are gluing, cutting, drawing, and animating little cardboard creatures. Windows, openings, stairs, ladders, tubes and slides make the city continuous and allow the eye and characters to slide from one place to another.
In the workshop “Holiday pass: Build an expanded world – with found objects, paper and augmented reality” the children invent a future city with artist and art educator Mirjam Fruttiger (K’Werk and SFG Basel) and computer scientist and art educator Anna Flurina Kälin (Freisicht and HEK).
The city is characterized by its high towers, hidden corners and tenderly designed gardens. Without streets and cars, the inhabitants, dragons and dinosaurs fly, slide and climb from one place to another. This future city is animated by small stop motion animation films that can be discovered and triggered via augmented reality using the “Artverse” app from Freisicht.
The intention was to give the children creative freedom, an opportunity to work with their hands and to explore the use of digital tools. Central to this concept was to make the most of the tools and materials available; Large cardboard panels were folded into towers, staircases and ships, and the animated films bring the city to life with images and sound, giving insight into the children’s thoughts and ideas. Using augmented reality the children were able to combine the physical and digital bringing to life their imagined world with stop motion videos in the cardboard landscape. The children did everything themselves from start to finish, they even added the digital content to the backend of the app themselves. This empowered them to work independently on their projects, adapting and expanding as needed. The result is a diverse and humorous future world!
View of the Cardboard city from the Holiday Pass Workshop: Build an extended world – with found objects, paper and augmented reality, August 2023 at HEK
You will also be able to discover this extended world in the foyer of the HEK in the next weeks and experience the augmented reality animations. We will announce when it has been installed!
Uncover how…
the little pig bathes in the fountain
the little man retracts his head in the door while feeding the dragon
the dragon flies away from the human’s nose
the flying ship takes off
the characters move through and on the tubes, slides and tracks of the city
a ladder race ends with a splash
In 2022 a similar workshop was held with the title “3D Unicorn in the Styrofoam Forest” at the K’Werk. As part of the project “Storytelling for the digital future”, this new version of workshop took place in the context of the Ferienpass X-Island Baselland and the Ferienpass Laufental-Thierstein. In this project we used the app “Artverse” by Freisicht, which was developed by Anna Flurina Kälin and others.
The Holiday Pass workshop “Portals to digital worlds” took place from 03.07-05.07.23 in collaboration with Ferienpass X-Island Baselland and Laufental-Thierstein as part of the project “Storytelling for the digital future”.
The project “Storytelling for the digital future” is supported by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne and the Binding Foundation.
