‘Wanderlost’—A Participatory Art and Design Endeavor

Abstract

`Wanderlost' addresses the growing complexity of life in today's city spaces and the imminent challenges to the development of the urban environment. It delineates experiences gained from a project's work, which incorporated workshops, artists' collaborations, interactive participatory setups in public, theatre and performance spaces. It is a result of two public workshops in the end of the four-year-long period in the People Smart Sculpture (PS2) framework in the cities of Kristianstad and Copenhagen, with public events in April/May 2017 and October 2017. In this article we discuss how the project was prepared, set-up and implemented. We call this storyworld `Wanderlost', developed from the project CubeX ``The Journey to Abadyl{''}. We describe this work in the sections Collaboration, Research and Methods to show how we draw knowledge, methods and research from our work in the collaborative network PRAMnet in developing participatory concepts using a virtual city, the city of Abadyl as a backdrop. We put forward our models for engaging participation in a storyworld to imagine the world and our relations anew. We conclude that the `Wanderlost' concept and project can be reused and re-situated in other contexts and environments; keeping the fundamental three formats with a digitally mediated tool, physical guides and explorative walks and a map of amusing and provoking artworks as a matrix.