Ars Electronica Chain Reaction Workshop
At the beginning of October, I joined my friends at Tinkertank to lead a giant chain reaction workshop at the Ars Electronica festival. Along with collaborators from Habitat Ausgburg and mrkz.at we spent five days inviting kids and adults to contribute free form rube goldberg style stations to our evolving kinetic sculpture.
Our workshop took place in the “create your world” section of POSTCITY, a converted post office facility in Linz, Austria with literal high ceilings, amazing slides and visible conveyor belts. This part of the festival had other hands-on activities from makerspaces and coding clubs. I loved the industrial setting and with the herculean effort of the Tinkertank crew to set up an incredible pop-up makerspace with a large footprint including soldering stations, craft materials, woodworking tools and a whole lot of inspiring scrap, it was a perfect place for tinkering.
It was fun and challenging to facilitate this chain reaction project and I wanted to share some of my reflections from this impactful experience.
One of the first things that I noticed when I arrived at the space (I got there on the second day of the festival) was the non-linear path of the machine. From the very start, the machine incorporated a giant tower with a flip dot screen, a plywood sculpture, pulley gondola and several hanging elements. The plan for the machine included many more unusual building stations and structures like an elevated catwalk, elements suspended above our heads and even the grand finale incorporating the giant slides. To make matters more complicated (and interesting), all of the tables that we were building on came in different sizes and heights.
This was a big change for me as I’ve usually set up a Tinkering Studio style chain reaction where the workspaces are more standardized and clearly delineated with inputs and outputs. We put together some areas like this in this chain reaction machine to connect the more diverse sections. I think that the constraints of this more limited set-up do help many participants find creative solutions, but I appreciated the opportunities to work on a different scale with fewer limits.
One moment of large scale building that will stick with me was when I was working with a ten-year-old girl to construct a giant ramp out of plywood. It reminded me of the large-scale construction at the tinkering school summer program in San Francisco. I could tell that the kids who built parts of the big freestyle sections of the chain reaction felt really proud of their creations.
One of the most fun parts of the experience tinkering over the five days of the festival was that it allowed us to create a relationship with some of the participants who came back to the workshop multiple times. We could see them starting to take ownership of the space and feel agency. There were several young participants who spent hours working on their part of the machine. They became comfortable with the tools and materials and in some cases took on the role of facilitators and invited others to work together.
Everytime we try a chain reaction machine we reflect on the materials for the project. Unlike so many tinkering activities, a chain reaction gives so much freedom that it’s really hard to curate the materials. I phase that I learned in German is “besser haben als brauchen” (better to have than to need) and usually we bring more parts then we could possibly use.
A couple of elements that were really useful for this reaction were L-brackets (because we could screw directly into the table), solenoids (because they are small and can be easily positioned to knock down a domino), neon tape (for marking the starting points and placements) and syringes (both triggered by physical mechanisms and also attached to electric pumps with thin hoses).
It was really interesting how ideas for making complex mechanisms seemed to build on each other over the four days of the construction. We saw participants come to the space with a material to incorporate (like a high-strength magnet) or an idea that they wanted to explore (like using an intermittent switch for a water pump). All of the groups worked hard to accomplish their designs with amazing results that seemed to get more and more interesting and complicated as the festival went on. There were really cool creations that were the result of experimentation with materials including zip-lines, magnet marble shooters and many interesting uses of syringes.
Another great idea for this large scale chain reaction was asking outside groups to participate in the machine. We had the amazing team at MKRZ build part of the chain reaction to run through their own Ars Elecronica booth! This incredible installation provided a great connection for our mutual exhibits. It would be really fun to try to make more of these types of collaborations in future projects.
One perennial challenge of the chain reaction workshop is balancing the process of creation with the fact that there’s a large dramatic moment at the end. On one hand, there’s a positive pressure that gives participants motivation because they are working on something larger than their individual projects. But on the other hand, the focus on the set off can sometimes take over the process and give both the participants and the facilitators stress to “make sure” that it will work. Some of the ways that we address this is by highlighting the idea of the magic finger (a way to poke the machine along) and celebrating the process of building during the final run more than the finished product. For this Ars Electronica chain reaction it was even more important to manage because the machine was so big and was built up over multiple days.
That said, watching the faces of those watching during Sunday morning’s set off showed why chain reaction is such a magical tinkering activity. The group (many of whom built part of the machine) were hanging on every step of the machine, cheering when things worked, laughing when the magic finger intervened and watching without breathing for some of the slow moving suspenseful parts.
At the end of the experience I felt that the chain reaction was a perfect project for the theme of the event “hope, who will turn the time”. As participants built and watched the machine that we labeled “the forge of hope” they were exercising their “hope muscles”. They were putting themselves in the shoes of artists, scientists and inventors who try something that probably won’t work according to plan but can be thought of as a learning experience and a step towards new innovations. Event though the machine won’t work perfectly from beginning to end, the act of hoping gives meaning to the experimentation. The process that we went through to work together, prototype and imagine possibilities felt very hopeful and I think that will have a continuing impact for all of us who experienced the workshop. Thanks to Tinkertank for inviting me to be a part of this hopeful endeavor!