Science Wonder Garden Party: Begbroke Science Park

We teamed up with local boater and artist extraordinaire Karis Harrington and Oxford University Development on July 1st for an afternoon of canal based creative mayhem.

The Oxford Canal runs alongside the Begbroke Science Park development. They asked us to join them on site for a Science Wonder Garden Party and bring the spirit of the canal with us.

We wanted to try out a marvelous story-telling device we’ve all fallen in love with recently, called a Crankie Theatre.

A Crankie Theatre is an old story-telling art form, where a long illustrated scroll is hand-cranked through a backlit wooden mini-theatre. In collaboration with all the mini-artists who joined us at our table smothered in paint, glue and potato stamps, Karis built a Crankie Scroll that tells the story of the Past, Present and Future of the Oxford Canal.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff that goes on up there at Begbroke, we connected to the work that is discovering how to extend the battery life of Lithium batteries, a technology that is expanding possibilities for boaters and other off-grid dwellers.

Enormous thanks go to the MANY people who came and got creative with us. We had a blast and hope you did too.

Watch the videos below to see Karis’s process and the finished scroll, performed inside her floating studio on the Oxford Canal!