Installation Inspiration

This is a list of attendee contributed ideas for things they'd love to see at EMF. Feel free to use it for inspiration for your own installations, but no need to take it too literally! While it would be brilliant to see some of the things on this list at EMF, it would also be amazing to see things tangentially inspired by these ideas.

Feel free to add to it, but please keep it clean and family friendly!

You can find guidance about building & bringing installations to EMF on our main website.

Ideas

1. Flags & banners
2. Impractical communication systems
3. Tubes you can shout down
4. Things that play with perception of scale
5. Really big magic tricks
6. Retro computer games, but with real people
7. Water installations that people can cool down in
8. A model of the ISS
9. Things that are both meals and tech demos
10. Use shadows in an interesting way
11. Remote controlled people
12. Inappropriate input methods
13. Rave in a box (Eastnor '88)
    1. On wheels
14. Large cardboard structures built over the weekend
15. Robot ducks
16. Games which are also shelters. Tents that know how to have fun
17. A model of the universe
18. A sound installation that detects things happening around it and converts them into a tiny FM transmission
19. New (fun) ways to connect cyberspace to real space and vice-versa
20. Adventure playgrounds for the imagination
21. Swings
22. Domes
23. Distributed works, spread out over the site
24. Treasure hunts
25. Mobile things that people can drag about/take with them that entertain them
26. Autonomous tent-avoiding bots
27. Autonomous tent-seeking bots
28. Think that’s a lot of LEDs? Use more LEDs
29. Ways to get strangers playing together
30. Things made from things that would otherwise be discarded
31. Sculpture kits, preferably large
32. Music-judging machines
33. Smoke signals
34. Ways to see through the planet
35. Ways to make the sky more interesting
36. Things that are full of helium, and can fly
37. Encourage exploration of the camp
38. Build on top of the infrastructure
39. Erasing the boundary between creator and spectator
40. More wearable (light-up, responsive) art
41. Making big things from small stuff
42. Art that reproduces
43. Random acts of kindness
44. Things that (mostly) stay underwater, and emerge every now and again
45. Does that monolith do something? OH WOW THAT MONOLITH DOES AN AMAZING THING
46. Things that can be assembled into an even more marvellous thing
47. Musical instruments
    1. That non-musicians can get a nice sound out of
    2. That can be played by a group of people
48. Things that live in the woods. No woods? Make the woods!
49. Weird things that broadcast radio frequency noises. Like numbers stations, but tiny and more strange
50. Location-based things. We have plenty of space for things to move about in
51. Things that exploit the sky
52. Augmented reality, but without having to stare at a screen
53. Things that only make sense from the air / a satellite
54. A machine that generates love letters
55. AI-driven model rowing boats, for the lake
56. Shipwrecks
57. Make your thing into a playground for other things - open APIs, MIDI/OSC interfaces, input & output jacks
58. Exploiting the topography
59. Respect the turf
60. Things that take care of tidying themselves up when we all go home
61. Miniature Sealand
62. Make our social connections tangible
63. What would Nemo do ? Choice of Nemo is up to the artist
64. Scavenger hunt / social service
65. Let’s have a look at the electromagnetic spectrum
66. A talk that is also a sculpture
67. A sculpture that is also a snack
68. Exploit network effects for increased cheer
69. The longer you play with it, the better it gets
70. A work that distributes itself
71. Help people to be kind
72. It prints things and you can take them home
73. Make DNS tangible
74. Blurring the line between clothing and cutlery
75. Make it easy for strangers to join in
76. A thing that indexes many other things
77. Ways for people to not be lost
78. Partial, temporary views of our future
79. Prophecies made flesh (or, more conveniently, made robot)
80. Ways of conveying laughter
81. Very big EMF logos. Preferably self-propelled
82. Things that make sense only very gradually
83. Things that help people to be good citizens
84. Things that are reasonably likely to fail (but will be amazing if they work)
85. Ways to shed light on things
86. Parade of giant squids
87. Imaginary maps
88. Tiny art cars
89. Things with effects spread out in space or time or both
90. Shoals of robot fish (land, sea or air)
91. Crazy golf
    1. Really weird golf
    2. Not even really golf at this point
92. Tiny gardens
93. Hidden things
    1. Containing games
94. Things that will inspire cheerfulness
95. In a dome
96. Things that do something useful, but only as a side effect (Bonus points if it takes all weekend to work out what the side effect was)
97. Anything involving nuclear fission
98. Anything involving nuclear fusion (get in touch first if this involves anything other than inertial electrostatic confinement)
99. Bridges. Literal and metaphorical
100. Things that don’t work unless several people work them
101. Bubbles
102. Scrapheap Challenge