#mobilemakers

The Mobilize Creative Collaborative is a collective of four artists—Aquil Charlton, William Estrada, Andrés Lemus-Spont, and me—who (usually) utilize bicycle-based makerspaces to provide free arts workshops for youth and adults in public places. We work to thoughtfully engage individuals and communities through interdisciplinary creative collaboration, critical conversations about what participants care about, and mobile mobilizing.

This past summer, the MCC was scheduled to facilitate a number of in-person workshops in public spaces through the Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks initiative. As you might guess, those didn’t happen, but we were excited to be invited to create a short video workshop as part of the revised Your Night Out At Home* programming instead.

So the guys and I came up with “Let’s Make Do!”

In this video, the Mobilize Creative Collaborative's members facilitate a playful interdisciplinary arts workshop from their homes. The MCC invites you and your loved ones to participate in these creative making and thinking activities with whatever things you have around you, drawing upon your own experiences.

Adapting our longstanding approach (of very open-ended, participant-responsive or participant-led, reused-material-heavy, drop-in and happened-upon, etc., etc.), public collaborations to an edited, unidirectional, 20-minute workshop was definitely challenging. And some of my favorite parts of our original recording—especially a several-minute jam session led by Aquil—ultimately had to be cut because of the ways in which Zoom captured the multi-source sound. But I do think the final video reflects important aspects of the spirit of our engagements, and offers something not so possible in person. We made the video in September and it went live in October, months when we would typically be winding down our annual programming. Even now, with subfreezing temperatures and snow on the ground outside, this workshop can be done at one’s leisure, in one’s own time and space, hopefully indoors.

*Tons of amazing artists from around the city were also invited to do this! Check out more 2020 Your Night Out at Home performances and workshops here.

Image description: A video title card. The image is an illustration with many shades of green, depicting a tree-lined cityscape and a starry night sky, with an owl (the Night Out mascot) in the bottom left-hand corner, waving to the viewer; the owl stands on a black, slightly rolling hill. In the center of the image, it reads in white text: “YOUR NIGHT OUT" with “AT HOME” tacked on; “Let’s Make Do!” and “MOBILIZE CREATIVE COLLABORATIVE”; and the hashtags #NightOutInTheParks and #MyChiParks. Along the bottom are logos for Night Out in the Parks, Music in the Key of Chicago, CHI | DCASE, and ComEd.

The FrankenToyMobile will officially be retiring this month! Our final workshop will be on August 15th, in the same location as our very first public event: Davis Square Park, about a mile south of our home.

Since the FrankenToyMobile hit the streets in summer 2015—this is our fifth summer of programming!—we have offered over 100 free public workshops all around Chicago, especially on the South and Southwest sides, in partnership with so many wonderful local groups and with more than 5,000 total workshop participants. It is hard to sum up in few words what this project has meant to us, and of course it's not about the numbers, and it's not even necessarily about the toys. We're proud and grateful to have been able to provide an opportunity for people of all ages to come together—to meet each other, to create together, to rethink and see new possibilities in objects and the world around them, to share joy in the public spaces of their communities. We feel honored and humbled that so many people entrusted us with their ideas, their visions, their places, and their time.

What's next for us? While Andrés Lemus-Spont and I are officially retiring the FrankenToyMobile as a project and activity, we do intend to continue our mobile making practice (including our involvement with the Mobilize Creative Collaborative), likely using the same physical bicycle to offer activities other than FrankenToy-making. We are still committed to the values and drive behind this project, and we want to make room for other ways of engaging, questioning, and making.

We invite you to participate in one of our final workshops, if you can (schedule online). A new addition we're especially excited about is that we will be joined for these by four Guest Artists! Since the founding of the FrankenToyMobile, we have hired teens/young adults (often former students of ours) to co-facilitate FrankenToyMobile workshops with us. Something we've been wanting to do for a while—and finally have been able to do—is invite a few of these individuals to serve as Guest Artists by leading their own workshops alongside the platform that relate to their own creative practices (you will also still be able to make FrankenToys at these events). We're excited for you—and us!—to learn from our Guest Artists in these coming workshops! We'll be sharing more info about each Guest Artist—Emmanuel Dunagan, Margo O’Neill, Simone Reynolds, and Alisha Webster—and their workshop @ https://instagram.com/frankentoy.

We are sad to let the FrankenToyMobile project go, but also excited to see what we can open ourselves up to learn and do next. Thank you to everyone who has helped make this project one of the most rewarding experiences of our personal and creative lives. <3

It's FrankenToyMobile season again, and our larger collective, the Mobilize Creative Collaborative, is out and about for the summer, too! The MCC is a collective led by four artists—the FrankenToyMobile (Andrés Lemus-Spont and Marya Spont-Lemus), the Mobile Music Box (Aquil Charlton), and the Mobile Street Art Cart (William Estrada)—who utilize bicycle-based maker spaces to provide free, creative workshops for youth and adults in public spaces.

We are slated for a robust summer of these free, public workshops, as invited by parks and communities and groups around the city, with many events scheduled and more to come! See our calendar for details (note: all-MCC events are marked as such in the event listing; other events are FrankenToyMobile).

Today I’m excited to share this brand new video about the Mobilize Creative Collaborative, shot by our friends at Scrappers Film Group during a workshop the MCC did last fall in support of Neighbors4 Environmental Justice, a grassroots group in McKinley Park (please check out and support N4EJ’s work!). Scrappers also made a delightful video focused on the FrankenToyMobile, recorded at an MCC workshop at La Villita.

Free! Ages 4-104! Public! Hope to see you out, and you can follow the fun on Instagram @frankentoy.

P.S. Know anyone in southeast Ohio? The FrankenToyMobile will be doing two workshops there the week of July 4th.

For the past two summers, the Mobilize Creative Collaborative—which includes the FrankenToyMobile (Andrés Lemus-Spont and me), the Mobile Music Box (Aquil Charlton), and the Mobile Street Art Cart (William Estrada)—was invited to visit parks in communities all around the city as part of Chicago Park District's Night Out in the Parks! See photos on Instagram @frankentoy.

I moved to Chicago on September 17th, 2011 from suburban Denver for a job as a Software Quality Assurance Analyst at a lovely proprietary trading firm that turned out to be a complete disaster.  Over two-and-a-half years later, I have pressed the reset button on my career and am immersed in intensive training to become an iOS Developer.  I could not have been more blessed to discover The Mobile Makers Academy (www.mobilemakers.co) right here in Chicago to get my foot in the door of a booming industry.  Until enrolling in this awesome program, I had not coded since my days in college over a decade ago, and never realized till now how much I really missed and enjoyed coding.

After a delayed-start due to Monday's ludicrous -50° temperatures here in Chicago, we braved the oh-so-reasonable -10° weather to begin our iOS journey together.

Brandon started us off with an overview of what we are getting ourselves into, before passing us off to Don and Max for a preliminary Q&A session.  

As an aside: if you have a moment, you really should click those links and read these guys' bios - they're ludicrously overqualified to be coaching a bunch of young upstarts - and yet here we are.  It's pretty awesome. There's a really amazing contagious energy surrounding this place, and I credit the facilitators for bringing a lot of it. How else could they have poached Thom from 15 years as the Senior Director of Marketing & Communications at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management? But enough bragging about the awesome people I get to learn from over the next two months, and back to the learning!

It turns out Xcode has a pretty incredible WYSIWYG editor that lets you build a UI without even touching code.  This will be fun to play with!  Our first assignment: creating a simple iPhone app with a simple button that turns the screen blue when pressed.  Of course, the pre-defined colorBlue is a pretty ominous shade of blue familiar to everyone who survived Windows 95, so I made mine slightly prettier.  

Did you know that Objective-C uses RGB values between 0 and 1, instead of the standard 0 to 255? I did not.

Next up, we made nifty little pseudocalculator apps, which takes one number from a text input box, another from a slider, and multiplies them.  Maybe the coolest part? See the little orange box in the upper right hand corner? 

That's provided by a framework Mobile Makers supplied for us.  If I click on that, it takes me to this page:

Which checks my code for me/them, using the user story requirements we were provided as guidelines to make the app. It even pushes that I've completed the task to the Mobile Makers server where it gives me fancy points and badges for completing the daily goals.