Jupiter Artland is an award-winning sculpture garden in Edinburgh where several contemporary art pieces are placed to be visited and experienced in a beautiful park with meadows, woods and water. Five art galleries are part of Artland. The team around Tom Flynt rebuilt the park and designed a corresponding virtual space in the 3D environment Minecraft. The goal was to create a facsimile of the real garden as an alternative virtual space for experiencing art for children.

Maintaining an accurate geography offers particular benefits for virtual Jupiter Artland. It adds authenticity to the experience with the virtual facsimile consistent and coherent with the real world (…) Using an accurate geography also allows for a blurring of realities, a novel transition between the real and virtual, with visitors to virtual Jupiter Artland able to use the paper map of the real in order to navigate the virtual, as in Figure 1.

Researchers have converted an existing Jupiter Artland park in Minecraft to reflect on reality, to allow all children to visit the park, the real park and the virtual park, or just the virtual park.
What is interesting about their study is that the children who first visited the park in real life were the ones who rejected virtual representations the least. The children who first visited the park in Minecraft had difficulty imagining very large sculptures, for example, and were more likely to reject the artwork in the real park that had more features in the virtual world, such as tunnels or caves.
Through the material and virtual existence of Jupiter Artland, the children could experience the artworks in different ways. In Minecraft they could even change the works.

This both provides a way to enable viewers to understand the elements of the art-work, but also offers am alternative temporal perspective, a view of the future.

Recognizability of the landscape and the artifacts

What is really amazing is the artifact in Minecraft, and how detailed it has been rebuilt virtually. When you build items in Minecraft it seems It seems possible to simulate not only the landscape, but also moving around in the world.it seems to have a rough structure, which is given by the bulky trestles. All the more surprising is the precision and the great and clear recognizability of the art objects in Minecraft.

How to use Minecraft as a Learning Environment

During our meeting in the IDEL realm i was asked how I would use such an environment in education. One example we read about is the Artland I mentioned above. Minecraft is a highly creative environment where you can meet and communicate with other people. The creation consists in building landscapes and buildings with the material you find in the resources center. So what could I use Minecraft with a team of students or peers?

Creation

Create a new or alternative environment for a team to meet, to store reminders or stories that are constituent for themselves. Reflect by creating objects or for instance socio-geographical situations, design social spaces and models, reflect on impact of architecture or environment on social development.

Collaboration

Minecraft can e a great environment to train collaboration and to reflect on the difference between cooperation and collaboration. A team can create something entirely new using its power and diversity. During the process they discuss their approach and result. I can imagine to use it as a playful way to support team building as well.

Simulation

Simulate a situation or a constellation to reflect on interpersonal processes or conflicts in a more playful environment (lineups, psychodrama… )

Rebuilding

Exploring by rebuilding real-life landscapes or another physical phenomenon like the human body or an animal to enable a different approach and deeper understanding of it.

Problem solving

Solve a problem collaboratively, build a prototype of an object, building…

Presentations and exhibitions

Present situations; map concepts in an experimental 3 D environment. Excursion to the buildings and creative work, sculptures, symbols…

Exploration

Explore a landscape with different approaches to topics / buildings (sculptures, artwork, objects, representations, prototypes etc.)

Links

jupiterartland.org

Literature: 

Flynt, T., Hall. L., Stewart, F., Hagan, D., Virtualizing the real: a virtual reality contemporary sculpture park for children. Digital Creativity 2018, Vol. 29, Nos. 2-3, p. 191-201.