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