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Hacking public art with Scratch

Reimagining public art through creative coding

Hacking public art with Scratch

In 2018, I led a workshop on hacking public art at the Scratch@MIT Conference. Since then, I’ve been meaning to prepare this tutorial. In reality, though, this is more of a collection of suggestions, tips, and guidelines, because the activity, as you’ll see, can be approached in countless ways and is completely open to variations.


The concept is very simple: it involves using creative coding to interact with and reinterpret the art we encounter in our surroundings.


Try this Scratch project with 3 examples.


This activity is suitable for children, adults, families, and is also an excellent tool for teacher training. It’s particularly engaging because it allows us to work outdoors, collaborate in teams, enhance our coding skills, and develop a deeper appreciation for the art around us —art we might see daily but often overlook.


The core idea is to take a walk with your team, select public artworks you’d like to play with, brainstorm creative ways to interact with them, and finally bring your ideas to life using Scratch. You can code directly outdoors using laptops or mobile devices, or you can take photos outdoors and then work on coding later in a classroom, at home, or in a museum.

Scratch’s graphic editor offers many creative possibilities for making effects and animations, and for most projects, it’s more than sufficient. However, for additional flexibility, you can use free online graphic editors to further manipulate the images before importing them into Scratch. I recommend Photopea and Pixlr —both are intuitive and user-friendly.


Ideas to Try:

  1. Add elements from a different context.

  2. Bring a sculpture or painting to life.

  3. Duplicate elements and experiment with them.



You can find inspiration in the projects featured in this Scratch studio, and I encourage you to add your own creations there.


Below, I’ve outlined a step-by-step guide for creating a project similar to the first one featured in this post (where the Scratch cat replaces the Botero cat).


Step-by-Step Instructions:

  1. Take a photo of the sculptureUpload the photo to Scratch and use it as a backdrop.

  2. Open the same image as a spriteReopen the image, this time as a sprite. Cut out the body of the statue (you won’t need its head) and adjust the color to match the orange tone of the Scratch cat.

  3. Edit the Scratch cat spriteUse the graphics editor to remove the cat's body, keeping only its head. Copy the head and paste it onto the statue sprite. Adjust its orientation and size to align with the statue.

  4. Program the animationMake the sprite fully transparent (set ghost effect to 100), then position and size it to align with the statue in the background. Program a delay (as long as you’d like), and use a loop to gradually reveal the sprite by decreasing the ghost effect incrementally.


This activity is a fun and creative way to connect coding, art, and community spaces. I hope you enjoy experimenting with it!



EDUARD MUNTANER PERICH, 2024. EDUARD.CAT is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

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