At the opening of Klik! Animation Festival we wanted to make an animation with everyone in the audience at the same time! We gave all the 300 people in the audience a light which they can draw with on the screen! We made a little live survey using their drawings. A sort of live data processing using light-painting! And some light-paint animation of course, that was kind of hard 🙂
A project by: Mathijs Stegink, Michael Veerman, Naomi Greenstein, Lae Schafer, Daan Lucas
Balloons are the DNA of parties. Our crazy clown scientists took over the party at Lowlands, bringing with them 15000 balloons for everyone at the party. From the stage we explained that we need help recreating the party spirit animals. The only thing the audience had to do was make as many connections as possible. We then took the created balloon chromosome carpet and build in some giant bloonmonsters out of them. They roamed the party afterwards!
Step into the earliest form of animation—no screens, no software, just pure hands-on magic. Our zoetrope workshop invites participants to make a looping animation using one of the oldest cinematic devices ever invented. Think of it as a hand-drawn GIF!
We bring everything:
the large zoetrope, stacks of prepared animation strips, and piles of markers. All you do is gather your group and let them dive into the joy of making motion emerge from still images.
If your venue has a big screen, we can plug in a simple live-camera setup that shows the animations spinning in real time. As a bonus, we can record the results for use in an after-movie or social media recap.
Participants come up with a tiny movement or micro-story—something loopable: a bouncing creature, a growing flower, a dancing object, or anything playful and surprising.
They translate that idea into 15 tiny drawings spread across the strip. Then: draw, colour, test, adjust, and try again. The moment your sequence suddenly comes alive in the zoetrope is always a small explosion of fun.
The workshop hosts up to 30 participants at once. Larger groups are possible—people may simply have to queue a little when testing their animations in the zoetrope.
In a superfast workshop (3 hours) students created these big characters, made a parade and trashed everything they made in classic cardboarders style. Thanks to Robert van Raffe, Gert Jan Pos for the images, the organisation of Motel Mozaique and all the dedicated students!
We (Mathijs Stegink and Sjors Knol) were invited to Landsberg by Wolfgang Hauck to create a Cardboarders project. We built for a week with the community, refugees, kids, artists and volunteers from all over the world! The old gym in which we worked used to be a shelter for hundreds of refugees. The space needed some positive interference. We tried to create a spiritual building inspired by the baroque Wieskirche and it’s architect D. Zimmerman nearby. The old churches we’re also built with many hands from the community and this was also our goal. We made experiments with light and shadow and developed an idea to create something really large with all the people that wanted to join us. Another thing that inspired us we’re the organic, intricate roccoco ornaments inside the architecture from the baroque. We still can’t believe how many people joined us and how much time they devoted to the project. On the last day there was an opening/closing, a day long cardboard party. And then it was destroyed. Alles Kaputt. Carpe diem, Memento Mori. Nothing changed but our minds and some images on facebook 🙂
What a great atmosphere on Defqon1! We can assure all the critics: the people that come to this festival only come for one thing: partying their behinds off! The things they made in our Defqon1 sweatshop this year are so awesome! It looks like they get more creative every year! Big round of cardboard for the best team ever: Astrid van der Velde, Jeroen Funke, Edo Sutherland, Beau Willems, Vanessa Hidalgo, Anne Wiertz and Mathijs Stegink!
We love the work by Olivier Grossetête. It’s not getting any larger than his cardboard architecture! It’s monumental-community-performance-architecture… Very wonderful to see how people lift the structures layer by layer! And then there’s the choreography’s. Check this video at 2:17…
The designs are reduced to their essence, so that they can be made with the basic cardboard boxes: like building blocks. I guess this is also important because all participants need to understand the building process to some extent. I collected some pictures showing the buildings being destroyed. The temporary nature of projects ensures that the process, stories and memories of working together on something monumental are more important than the finished product. I guess this makes it more a performance or ritual than an art piece. “The work is never perfect or finished, people find their place within it. Perfection is something that’s dead. It’s something that’s not living, it’s not real,” says Grossetête quote from interview on Mashable .
KABOOM animation festival (before the KLIK! Animation Festival Amsterdam) is our favorite festival. This year we we’re asked to do a special parade for the opening of the festival. As if a lot of characters escaped from the animations. We made giant walking and flying characters with students from the HKU academy for the arts and the volunteers from KLIK! We stimulated the students to create the characters so that they had some movement in them: we explained some automata principles and they really got to work with the mechanics!
After the opening show we continued building a pirateship-under-water-scene-sculpture for the academybuilding.
We can help you make people make!
We love people with a playful attitude and energy. So we honour Wayne White way too late on this site. He should have been the first post! His work is a fusion of puppetry, cartoons, sculpture and painting. He worked as a designer for film and television (remember Pee-wee’s Playhouse?).
His cardboard sculptures are what we need to show here though. He creates them for gallery spaces, parades and festivals. Be true: don’t these giants give you an itch to go make things yourself? His elaborately rendered sculptures are also puppets, with ropes to pull to control their movement. White seems to make no distinction in low- and high art. The puppets recall the costumes that Picasso made for the Parade and the best MAD! characters at the same time.
Wayne White quote from the Miami New Times: “I come for the laughs. I don’t purposefully set out to be youthful or whimsical, but it is there. I own up to it. There’s a part of my work that’s very populist. I’m an entertainer. Totally. But there’s a darker part of my work that comes out in my drawings and paintings, where I take on a darker parts of the American scene. But a big part of my scene is putting on a circus a show. I’m happy to do it with no irony.”
The images we show here are from White’s instagram: go follow him here!
Arttube is a videoplatform curated by almost all of the dutch musea. They asked us if we could fill their venue at the Lowlands-festival with animation workshops. So that’s what we did! We made a Floor of Frames, we brought three zoetropes and build a Wall of Frames. We asked people to work / create / animate with the big prints of famous artworks the
musea provided.
We have lots of experience in making people make! YEAH TELL ME MORE!
Cardboard is in fact what the dutch call a “kreukelzone”: the protective crushable area in a car. A cardboard box is protection for our stuff, like clothing or architecture is protection for our selves.
I am fascinated by people making costumes shaped as buildings, architecture or furniture. Scale models of buildings have a poetic attraction. Maybe it has something to do with growing up: the size of your house when you we’re a kid seems small when you return as an adult. It also brings the scene from Alice in Wonderland to mind, where she grows so much that she’s bursting out of the white rabbit’s house.
Clothing and architecture deal share the same principles: the human size, color, shape, proportion, space, functionality. They both exist to protect and cover the human body. In away a piece of clothing can be seen as portable, flexible architecture. What happens if architecture becomes portable? And attached to our bodies? Tracy Featherstone (USA) creates a sort of hybrid between architecture, furniture, clothing, body extensions and the human figure.
I love this idea: a small city roaming around a big city. Check these beautiful works by Emily Speed (UK). Her city costumes are called “Inhabitants”. They look lost in the big city. A kid version of the city, lost in the body of the grown up. The bare feet of the wearer of the sculpture emphasize the fragility of the human inside. Does she know where she is going? Emily: “Inhabitant is about trying to find your own place or identity in a city and the representation of psychological space”. The costume also reminds the experience of entering a new city, which often has an overwhelming effect: as if it swallows you!
This image is from a ball in New York City (in 1931), famous architects dressed as buildings they had designed! The Chrysler building guy in the middle looks like he’s a bad guy from the power rangers 🙂 I guess that for architects it’s normal to make models of their buildings, so these costumes are just another step in playing with scale. Another group of New York artists: the New York Five are pictured below: wearing their own designs for a 1996 Vanity Fair feature.
Oh yeah, and then there’s Picasso who made some wearable buildings for the Parade Ballet!
This workshop took place at the museumN8 in the Joods Historical Quarter in Amsterdam. During the party, the visitors of the Museumnight helped us in making some paper puppet animations, which we’re recorded directly and shown as visuals behind the DJ. It was very interesting to combine the technique of traditional shadowpuppets with a workshop and using the output as visuals. We used the same setup on different festivals / parties lately and we still love it 🙂
During the Tijdens MN8 we set up an animation / cardboard costume workshop in the Hermitage. First you made your own Kokoshnik and beard. Then you sat at the table to participate in the movie that was being animated with the specially prepared objects. Live-size animated sequences and pinned dolls of walking pigs, melting teacups and fish swiming on the plates.
“Can you make something during our exhibition? Because we have an industrial dairy show, a packaging show and industrial processing show!”
Ok! We can! We will then make mechanical cardboard cows!
During the shows we were on the floor to work on our automata …
Thanks too Michael Veerman, Jeroen Funke, Josephine Beijer en Nienke van Soest!
HRFST festival is a new festival by Xsense in the Netherlands. They asked us to work together with the students from Utrecht School of the Arts to make some of the decorations! Thanks to all the students and supercreative Bram Schinkel for all the help!
In the last days of august we finally had a real russian Cardboardia project in the Netherlands! The Spoffin festival invited our russian friends to Amersfoort to make a giant parade.
For those who don’t know Cardboardia yet: it’s a larger than life project from Russia. Sergej Korsakov, the uncompromising leader, is the axis around which cardboardia turns. The projects are theater, temporary social experiments, creative economies and visual arts all rolled in to one. We went to one of the materialisations in the form of a city in Perm. The cardboardia projects always have some story to it, they mostly evolve around the visions and fantasies of Tyran of Cardboardia, but leaving a lot of space for participants to realize a cardboard version of their own dreams.
Cardboardia Amersfoort was a parade of Tyran’s dream machines, characters, toys and games. It was big fun having the cardboardians around and working with them again. It seems our big dream: creating a worldwide cardboarders event is coming closer and closer!
The MonsterMotel was a quirky cross-over between a giant dollhouse, tamagoshi’s, sesamestreet and Big Brother. We wanted to know if we could make people act, just by putting them in a set with a large puppet. We hoped to challenge them to act and improvise. We arrived a week before the festival with a group of 25 creatives and a lot of material to make a motel with 6 rooms with glass windows. During the festival a Monster lived in each room. The Monsters were silently communicating their needs through the glass with the audience outside. They provided different services to festival goers, it was up to them to find out the rest.
One of the characters was a whore. She tapped on the window suggesting you would visit her. In a very inapropriate place was a little show theater with a pole dancing fetus!
You could visit Tattoo Hank to get a giant piercing or a huge tattoo. At the Sokkenwasser (Sockomat): Here you could get your socks washed. You were given an arbitrary pair of dry socks back. So the festival goers ran around in each other’s socks (well washed thankfully).
Grandpa: This elderly man behind the window was very lonely. Visitors were able to go see him to pick up his stockings, read a book or just to chat. The last day of the festival grandfather hanged himself. What caused many condolences and expressions of grief.
RoboDeath: A robot made tough robot techno. If you had made a cardboard instrument in the cardboarderstent you could in here and just rock out with the robot. Your 15 seconds of fame!
Porn Pimpy: The yakuzzi was filled the whole day with visitors who came to visit the pimp. Men and women were given a cocktail and some mysterious white powder. The butler told a lot about the life and ramblings of Porn Pimpy.
Wow! Cardboarders on Lowlands… Each year it is getting bigger and better! This year we we’re joined by famous cardboarder and boxwarior Ross Koger (Australia) and a new team from Cardboardia (Russia). Next to our loyal team from the Netherlands of course. Besides the annual boatrace we had a CardCar Flintstones Derby and a night the MonsterMotel party!
Nice article on NPO 3FM about all the cardboard signs that were made 🙂
And another one in dutch newspaper NRC about playing with cardboard on lowlands!
