Space Junk Mobile

A hands-on workshop to explore technology in a creative, playful and critical way.

What if the packaging filling our bins could become… satellites, pieces of rockets or strange objects floating in space?

In this playful, hands-on workshop, artists Kati Hyyppä and Niklas Roy invite participants to explore the issue of space junk through creative making. Using recycled materials and everyday packaging, participants will imagine and build their own pieces of space debris before assembling them into one large collective mobile.

The workshop plays with the sometimes surprising similarities between our everyday waste and space technologies: the reflective surface of a crisp packet can become that of a satellite, while a milk carton can be transformed into a space module… Cutting, assembling, repurposing and tinkering offer a hands-on way to explore topics such as waste, reuse and our relationship with technology.

Kati Hyyppä and Niklas Roy are two artists and makers whose practices combine technology, DIY, experimentation and repurposing. For Play Test!, they developed this workshop as a simple and reproducible method requiring no previous technical skills.

This session at Le Pavillon is specifically aimed at youth professionals and teachers. The goal is both to experience the workshop as a participant and to leave with a method and ideas that can easily be adapted for activities with young people. This approach to sharing and reusing methods lies at the heart of Play Test!, a European Erasmus+ project exploring new creative approaches to digital education and youth work.