OliOli Residency Week One

For the next three weeks I’m onsite for an artist residency at OliOli, a new innovative children’s museum located in Dubai, UAE. Over the course of the engagement I’ll be building some exhibit prototypes, leading professional development workshops for staff and local educators and participating in a giant STEAM event on Oct. 18th.

I arrived at the museum on Oct. 7th and was immediately impressed by the collection of interactive exhibits, art pieces and play spaces. There are galleries dedicated to exploring water elements, experimenting with air, digital light play from team lab and a giant colorful crocheted net climbing structure (that I took advantage of the early morning tour to jump on in).

My home for the week is the creative lab, a workshop space next to the gallery where staff prototype new workshop ideas and prepare materials for camps, classes and birthday parties. It was so great to see all of the materials that they had prepared for me before my arrival.

Right away I started on prepping materials for an art machines workshop that I planned to lead with the explainer staff. They have a laser cutter right out on the museum floor so as I started producing a bunch of gear motor hubs we could immediately start testing them with some young visitors and staff.

Over the next two days I led some quick tinkering workshops for the team for them to play with wind up toy dissection and art machines and discuss their experience learning through tinkering.

As always it was super fun to see the wide variety of outcomes in their physical projects as well as hear their reflections about the experience.

Back in the creative lab, I started work on three projects that I hope to finish by the end of the residency, a new musical bench, flexible cardboard stop-motion animation hardware and a collection of lights, motors, screens and materials for light play.

I’m hoping to get the musical bench up and running by the 18th so that was where I spent the bulk of my efforts. For this version (3.0?) I was planning to integrate the Playtronica touchme and another microcontroller shield called a Bela Board which is made for sound/music experiments. It was a bit of a challenge just to get everything meshing together, but by yesterday afternoon I had a rough version up and running that we could start to test.

Over the next couple of days I’ll work on refining the sound quality and adding the hardware to the bench so that it can be out on the floor for the STEAM event.

As well I’ve started working on designing the animation station cardboard enclosures and soldering up the motors and super bright LEDs for light play. We’re planning a workshop with local teachers on the 24th around the art, science and storytelling of light play so that will be a good deadline to finish up those materials.

It’s already been such a fun time working with the team here and I can’t wait to see how all of these exhibit prototypes progress over the next couple of weeks!