Project

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Cardboard Kingdom: Digital

Cardboard Kingdom

by Bridgel, Chloe, Mavis and Viena

About the artwork

Cardboard Kingdom is a recreation of the fascinations and perceptions one has about the world during childhood. When you’re small, everything around you just seems bigger, and a simple room could become a castle in your imagination. In this interactive installation, we have tapped into their memories from early childhood to recreate an innocence and simplicity that could only be possessed by a child.

Reminiscing on our childhood days where we were content with playing with the simplest of materials in the smallest of spaces, we have created a child’s playhouse simply using recycled materials incorporated with interactive digital elements. Cardboard Kingdom aims to gift participants something that is rare in today’s world: a little bit of pure childhood fun, reminding us that happiness can be found in the simplest of things.

Digital Project Planning

Since we had already crafted all of our furniture and household appliances during the analog phase of our project, for this next phase we were able to focus solely on coding and digital interactivity.

Knowing that we already had a lot of tactile and scent components from our analog project, we decided to make it a multi-sensorial experience by adding visual and audio elements using lights, sounds, sensors and simple projection mapping. The feedback and observations from the analog project was also a gauge for us to decide which appliances/furniture worked and which didn’t, hence the choice was made to remove the toilet bowl and include a sofa for the living room instead.

Digital Project Process

Visual Appearance

4 large walls were created by sticking separate pieces of cardboard together. The walls were then placed together held up by pillars to create a makeshift “room”.

We decided to paint the entire house including walls and furniture white, to make it look a little more interesting as the colour of the raw cardboard is quite dark and looks a little too shabby! The walls and furniture were painted using house paint as we wanted to let participants draw on the objects using coloured chalk and the house paint would give the chalk a base to stick on.

Bathtub

In order to create a more “realistic” bathtub compared to the analog version, we decided to make the taps of the bathtub work by connecting them to potentiometers via Arduino, and these potentiometers controlled audio output (through the use of MAXMsp).

The potentiometers provide a range of values into Arduino, and MAXMsp receives these values from Arduino through serial 9600, and then used through MAXMsp we controlled the speed of the sound (water flowing). Similarly, we made use of this same concept to control the brightness of the LED strip that was placed in the bathtub, under the foam peanuts.

Sink

The sink used an identical Arduino code to the bathtub, using a potentiometer to control the speed of the audio that played on a loop.

Stove

For the stove, we wanted to incorporate the idea of what we did for the analog together with the digital idea, hence we decided on the use of pressure sensors. For analog, audience were able to “create their own recipe” with the use of vinegar and baking soda. In the digital aspect, they are now able to “cook” their recipe, as through the pressure sensors, when the pots are placed on the stoves, the led light strips are lit up to simulate fire – through the use of Arduino, FastLED.

Oven

For the digital version of the oven, we wanted to make something happen using the oven door as a trigger. Hence, we decided on using an infrared sensor to detect the distance of the door when closed to open. When the door opens, the distance increases and this triggers the LED strip within to shine a warm light – just like a real oven. When closed, the value falls and hence the light clears.

Television

With the television, compared to what we did for analog (puppets), the TV went into “no signal” and using Arduino servo motor, we decided to make it glitch a little everytime the button was pressed.

Projection Mapping

The projection mapping videos were illustrated by us and animated with After Effects. Using a projection mapping software called vpt8, we were able to map it onto specific areas that we wanted in the house rather than having to tilt and move the projector itself. Since we wanted it to be interactive, we decided to make the animation play only when someone has reacted to the object, through sensing motion. vpt8 is a MaxMSP-based software so we were able to use a MaxMSP patch with vpt8 that allowed us to connect a USB webcam to the laptop and map our areas from the webcam that we wanted to use to trigger the video so that when someone moves into that area, the software will play the animation.

vpt8

Final Outcomes, Video, Reflections

This project has been really fun to do and we are glad that we managed to do what we set out to do from the beginning, which was to create a life size dollhouse out of recyclable materials that would bring childlike fun and joy to participants.

One thing that was interesting was that we realised people seemed to have more fun playing with the analog aspects of the house (chalk, cooking) than with the digital aspects! I guess that’s the point of having an analog phase, to show us that analog works can bring joy and be successful too.

It has been a fulfilling semester working on Cardboard Kingdom for us, thanks again to everyone who came to see our work and to LP for all the guidance and help!

Cardboard Kingdom: Analog

Cardboard Kingdom

by Bridgel, Chloe, Mavis and Viena

About the artwork

Cardboard Kingdom is a recreation of the fascinations and perceptions one has about the world during childhood. When you’re small, everything around you just seems bigger, and a simple room could become a castle in your imagination. In this interactive installation, we have tapped into their memories from early childhood to recreate an innocence and simplicity that could only be possessed by a child.

Reminiscing on our childhood days where we were content with playing with the simplest of materials in the smallest of spaces, we have created a child’s playhouse simply using recycled materials incorporated with interactive digital elements. Cardboard Kingdom aims to gift participants something that is rare in today’s world: a little bit of pure childhood fun, reminding us that happiness can be found in the simplest of things.

Conceptualisation

The idea for this project came about when one day, we just happened to be talking about our childhoods and what we liked to play with. We discovered that for some reason, many people as kids tend to be fascinated by small spaces like cardboard boxes and personally for me, it has been my childhood fantasy to create a huge structure out of cardboard and just crawl in it!

SERIES D (SQUARE TUBES), REPRODUCTION. Charlotte Posenenske, 1967/2015. Cardboard.

We also came across the above artwork while on a field trip to the National Gallery’s Minimalism exhibit, which gave us the idea that this childhood fantasy of ours could actually be turned into an actual artwork. To keep with the theme of childhood, we decided to recreate a life-sized interactive dollhouse out of cardboard!

Analog Project Conceptualisation

The first phase of the project was to create the analog version. Since we already knew that we would be using cardboard to create the objects for both the analog and digital versions, we decided to just create the things that we wanted to have for the final product and just add on the digital aspects after completing the analog ones.

We discussed and came up with a list of household furniture and appliances that we felt could be more interactive, both analog and digitally, as well as which rooms we wanted to have:

Kitchen

  • Stove
  • Sink
  • Oven
  • Washing Machine

Living Room

  • Fish tank
  • Television
  • Potted plant

Toilet

  • Toilet bowl
  • Bathtub

We created a mock-up sketch to plan out the functions of each component:

Analog Project Process

To start off, we created this miniature model of our project in order to picture how the final product looks and test the properties of our chosen material (cardboard)

Scent components

To make the analog project more immersive, we decided that in all the “rooms” we would have a scent component to it on top of having the cardboard structures.

Chloe hard at work (:

Using flour, food colouring and food colouring, we created a scented paste which we were able to harden to create certain objects in the house or coat over the cardboard structures to give off certain scents.

Kitchen

The main attraction of our “kitchen” is the kitchen sink, oven and washing machine! All the knobs and doors can be turned and toggled, and the oven contains a scented “pandan cake” which we made with our scented paste. The washing machine has a rotatable drum which the audience can open the door of to take things in and out, like a real washing machine.

Plastic toy foods

Vinegar mixed with food colouring for “cooking”

Scented “cupcakes” and toy eggs

We also purchased some plastic cooking toys because what’s a dollhouse without cooking toys? We wanted participants to play with our structures like they were children playing in a big doll house, so we also had some toy pots and pans and some baking soda so that they could mix it with the coloured vinegar to create chemical reactions and pretend that they were cooking!

The entire kitchen family!

Bathroom

Toilet bowl made using a wooden stool as a base that participants could sit on. We later added a flippable lid to the toilet bowl and created fake “poop” scented with plant fertiliser which was placed under the lid on the stool!

We attempted to make a round bathtub by bending and shaping different pieces of cardboard and taping them together, however it turned out to be really flimsy so we switched to a rectangular structure instead and added a turnable knob!

The tub was filled with foam packing peanuts so that participants could jump inside for tactile sensory play!

Living Room

We created a cardboard television with a hollow base, as well as some sock puppets, so that participants could put on their own puppet shows and watch them through the TV! We wanted to encourage them to be participative in our installation and to use the creativity and imagination that everyone has as a young child.

Coating the “leaves” with pandan scented paste

Puppet show for LP

There is also a fish tank which can be seen on the right side of the above photo, which has colour-coded fishes and sliders that participants can move around to make it appear like the fish are “swimming” in the tank.

Outcomes and Reflections

The analog project was really fun to do! Before doing this project we really didn’t realise how much we as interactive media artists rely purely on digital components to create interactivity in our works. The analog project really forces us to think about what really makes a work interactive. It’s not just about throwing on as many lights and cameras and sensors as we can, it’s about thinking how participants/audience will react to the pieces and the kind of reaction it evokes in them that’s more important.

Apart from that, looking back the analog project was really helpful to our digital project because it creates a basis from which we can build our digital components around. By reusing the same components from our analog project in our digital project, we were able to use the digital aspect as an enhancement to our analog pieces which were already interactive. The analog and digital components complement one another rather than relying too much on just one aspect, which is something that we as artists and creators should keep in mind especially in this day and age where we tend to be so focused on new technologies that we forget that physical forms and objects have an important role to play as well.