Building an Alternate Reality out of Cardboard

Lottie Child and Anna Lucas



If I was you I’d just relax because nobody’s forcing you to do it, you can just make up stuff and enjoy your selves. Just do it, it’s by your rules. Ask other people to join in. You can use a laptop to type out stuff in the game. Or you can imagine in your head what ever you want and see what its like. Pretend one thing is another thing. Whatever place you are in you can pretend its somewhere else, like the kitchen can be the city. Use towels, watches and gloves, whatever. You need at least two people. It depends what you’re doing but sometimes it can be fun especially in the park. When you’ve done it some one can say "mission accomplished".

“The main characteristic of play, whether of child or adult, is not its content but its mode. Play is an approach to action, not a form of activity.” Jerome Bruner

On Friday 15th April at the Exner Gasse Gallery, part of W..Wir Wissen.
Lottie Child and Anna Lucas from the University of Openness, members of the Manoa Free University, contributors to W..Wir Wissen and participating children will construct a low-fi, DIY, alternate reality using cardboard boxes, which they will inhabit together as action research into collaboration through play. This is field work for learning and relearning forgotten modes of creative research, trying out new behaviours, problem solving, investigating, organising ideas and suspending some of the rules of physical social reality. For all participants it is an experiment in working on equal terms. We will distil and synthesize what we learn from the process into a set of tools for collaborative activity. Playing in this other reality will create real understandings and behaviours that will remain with us, change us and can be applied in real situations.


This is experimental research, we are prepared to be surprised, for it to be awkward, fall apart, or even evaporate into thin air. By constructing this situation and seeing how it plays out we’re wondering…
Who decides who decides? In the light of Inclusivity policies in arts and business, can people with wildly different degrees of skill and power contribute equally? Can we remain involved during the process? Can we play together? Will children feel they can have a stake in wider society if they create a mini society and act within it? Can the ability to collectively imagine another reality that intersects with this one be powerful majik for social change? What kind of reality will we make?

Current UK legislation restricts adults from interacting with children in all but the most determined settings, thus further separating and restricting cross inspiration, through fear of bodies spiralling out of control. Play together move into multi-dimensional reality ................and then............and then...............and then....

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