AR Timemachine
Interactive AR wall paintings, at the 1st Model Junior High School of Athens
Within the framework of the afternoon school clubs at the 1st Model Junior High school of Athens, an ongoing project of interactive wall paintings through AR has been developed during the academic years 2021-2024, shaped around an idea born during the Covid-19 pandemic. The project is a fruitful collaboration of the art club “Humanity Timemachine” and the IT club “Mobile Devices Programming” of the school. The members of these two clubs are students 13 to 15 years old, with special interest in art and/or programming.
The large scale wall paintings drawn on the walls of the school’s stairway by the students/members of the “Timemachine” club depict different phases of the evolution of life and human civilization on Earth, aiming to create a daily experienced and "alive" historical timeline. The round shape of the paintings refers to the windows of an unknown spaceship traveling through time. At the time being this “timemachine” consists of “windows” with views to the first periods of life on Earth, millions of years ago, placed on the ground floor of one of the school’s buildings, in chronological order: the first life in the sea, the first insects, reptiles and birds, the mammals and dinosaurs, followed by the great volcanic eruptions, the asteroid catastrophe and the ice age. As the stair of the school starts going up, the paintings-“windows” depict the first human species and civilizations, starting from the Paleolithic era and cavemen, followed by the first settlements. As we move up the stair the civilizations evolve. We can see the first great civilizations in the Mediterranean: Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. At the present, the art club members are painting the “Timemachine windows” representing the Minoan era, the Cycladic civilization, the Mycenaean era and are preparing to complete the ancient world civilizations with wall paintings dedicated to the Archaic art, the Classical era, Macedonia and Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic and Ancient Roman civilizations.
During their preparation in small groups, in order to create each wall painting, the students have been researching on the referring civilization and have been creating original digital content-texts, images, sketches, short animations. This material has been uploaded on a timeline at Padlet application, following the time order of the civilization phases.
During the academic year 2021-2022, the IT club “Mobile Devices Programming” used the Augmented Reality (AR) application ARTIVIVE to turn the first completed paintings to an interactive sensation for all the students, teachers and visitors of the school, adding public domain videos to the experience and making the wall paintings “come to life” when the visitor used a device to observe them. The next year (2022-2023), as the painting work continued, the IT club members managed to create a program themselves, to augment the wall paintings and connect them to the original digital content already produced by the students.
In the following presentation we may see how this project developed through the years in the 1st Model Junior High school of Athens. How did the art club “Humankind Timemachine” work in groups with their visual arts teacher Eugenia E. Palla, researching, writing, making digital content, creating preliminary sketches, testing and finally drawing on the school’s walls to create the wall paintings? How did the IT club “Programming Mobile Devices” work with their IT teacher Sofia Mougiakou to create the interaction and connect the wall paintings to the students’ original digital content and videos?
Finally we will see the completed result and the visitors’ experience of this combined work, and understand how the power of collaboration can form a creative time-space in the school between students and teachers, that produces enthusiasm and wellbeing along with the cultivation of knowledge, multiple skills and aesthetics.
Gelina Palla lives and works in Athens,Greece. She studied Visual and Applied Arts, gaining BA and MA in Painting from the School of Fine Arts, AUTH 1999, Greece and a Master’s degree on Audiovisual Arts (MSc, 2020) at Ionion University, Greece. She is a visual artist and musician/sound artist and also works as an art educator in Greek public education. She was a founding member of miniMaximum improVision (2006-2019), an ensemble conducting and presenting audiovisual live prformances. Gelina Palla composes music and soundscapes for theater and performances. She has worked with the music project JOALZ (2015-2019). She has curated art exhibitions and designed art education programs, as for the Onassis Stegi, The Megaron (Athens Concert Hall) and Piraeus Bank museums network. Since 1992 she works as a free-lance set designer for theater, music performances and advertisement films. Both her artistic research and educational practice combine image and sound, composing drawings, painting or video with sound objects, field recordings and live music, utilising new media and sensors in artworks, installations and performances.
Gelina Palla has participated in exhibitions and performances at Public Tobacco Factory (1922-2022, Exodus, Athens, 2023), Onassis Stegi (Sounderella, Big Bang, 2022), Athens Odeon (100 years BAUHAUS, 2019), Portikus Farnkfurt (Georgia Sagri and I, 2018), Documenta 14 (Epitaph, Athens 2016), Goethe Institut Athen (Timelapse Athens, Moving Silence 2016), Prague Quadrennalle of performing Arts ( 2015), Forum Wallis VII (Switzerland, 2013), Roman Agora archaeological site, “In Agora-Goethe-Institut Athen-60 years" (2012), Athens and Epidaurus Festival (Clytaemnestra-space E, 2011), etc.
Sofia Mougiakou has been a Computer Science teacher in secondary education since 1996. She holds a B.Sc. in “Informatics and Telecommunications” (November 1994) from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, a M.Sc. in “Electronic Automation” (June 1998) from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, as well as a M.Sc. with distinction in e-Learning from the University of Piraeus (June 2020). She has two years of administrative experience as a high school principal and 10 years as Head of the Center of Informatics and New Technologies of the Directorate of Secondary Education of Piraeus. She participated as a member of the Education Committee in two co-funded European projects for teachers’ professional development, as well as in the Learn2Analyze project (Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance Program), during which the first edition of the Learn2Analyze MOOC was completed successfully on 14th January 2020 – with 1500 participants, while the second run was completed on 31st December 2021 - with 2000 participants. She has 18 years of teaching experience as a computer science teacher in secondary education. She has several conference announcements regarding the exploitation of blended learning using Moodle Learning Platform at the high school level.
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