Sydney Opera House: Creative Play

I was commissioned to create an interactive artwork for the July Creative Play program at the Opera House. Creative Play runs every school holidays and aims to provide children with an experience where they can become the artists. 

The brief was an artwork that could accomodate a large number of participants at one time, had a very low barrier of entry but allowed for deep relationships to emerge. Additionally it had to run unsupervised into the evening and power itself off at the end of the night. 

This was achieved technically by Kinect sensors feed a depth image to custom software. The images are processed and sent to projectors. Due to the low roof height we used compact short throw projectors and mirrors to hit the tables. 

Echo Table is available for deployment at your event in standard or customised versions. For further information contact me.

Client - Sydney Opera House

Director and Co Designer - Frank Newman (Creative Learning Specialist, Sydney Opera House)

Co Designer - Georgia Hopkins

Artistic Collaborators -
Curtis Fenandez
Sabrina D'Angelo

Concept and System Design - Toby K

Continue reading for more images and an animation of the artwork being used

Sydney Opera House Presents built a lego structure for their January 2014 creative play program. Children were given free reign to build on vertical plates with a range of classic blocks. 

I was commissioned to build several cameras into the structure that would be projected on the nearest wall. As well as live video the cameras took timelapse footage that was played back every 5 minutes, as well as daily timelapses of the entire project. The supervising artists were able to reposition the cameras both physically and zoom in on them digitally. 

The vertical nature of the plates tends to lead to representative building - I.E writing names and creating images in 2D. The idea of the video elements was to encourage builders to think about different perspectives in time and space and develop their designs accordingly.

Sponsored by Lego Education.