Light, Shadow and LEGO at Elztal Museum

Over the past months I’ve been working on developing more local tinkering connections with schools, libraries and museums in the Freiburg area. This weekend I tested a workshop at the Elztal Museum in Waldkirch which displays many musical (and sometimes automata-tized) organs, alongside other local craft traditions.

For the winter season they are hosting a special LEGO exhibition and they invited me to come and try out an experimental tinkering workshop for families in the studio. This gave me the chance to explore my favorite prototype LEGO pull-string motors in a new context of light and shadow sculpture.

I set up the space with a station full of reflecting, refracting and translucent materials that could be attached to the motor thanks to the magic of hot glue and LEGO base boards that I bought in bulk. There was a darkened area with white screens for testing the sculptures. As well, since we predicted lots of participants, I made a second table space with the pull-string art machines that I have tried in a few other settings.

Even more than we had thought, the workshop was packed with people with a huge crowd gathering outside the space ten minutes before the start of the event. Instead of a more relaxed drop-in format, we quickly decided to switch to 30 minute workshop intervals so that as many people as possible would have a chance to experiment with the activities.

I really like these little pull string motors (which unfortunately are not widely released yet by LEGO). They are perfectly suited for tinkering because they have many connection points which allow for wide-walls in the creations. As well I think that the 15-20 second time of the spinning once the string is pulled promotes iteration because each new pull gives a moment of pause to try and change something about the machine. If you want to try alternative motors you can experiment with battery powered ones, a pull-back version or even get inspired by master builders to make hand-crank art machines.

One of the things that I really liked about the workshop was that there were so many great interactions between family members working together. I think the combination of LEGO parts that the kids may have been more familiar with along with some of the everyday elements that the parents wanted to try resulted in some productive and creative collaborations.

After the workshop, during the reflection time, the other facilitator and I remarked about the ways that this activity shows low thresholds, wide walls and high ceilings. The LEGO pieces seem to give a workshop an immediate low ceiling because of the familiarity that so many learners have building with these parts. The wind-up motors plus everyday materials allow for many new ideas and surprising creations and the parts support really advanced and complex ideas.

I’m looking forward to more collaborations with the Elztal Museum in the future and continued experiments with how we can connect LEGO parts with everyday materials for explorations of art, science and technology.