Paper boat

Paper Boat is an AR game/interactive experience that draws the passerby’s attention to the impact of global warming and the rising sea level in coastlines areas, using the elements of play, animation and scientific data. One of the main issues we face in society in this regard is that we can’t directly see what is happening around us or envision the pace of climate change in our daily lives. This audiovisual interactive AR project brings visualization to the exceedingly fast-paced melting glaciers, rising average temperature, and other global warming data on sea shores.

In this interactive AR game/experience, the player will have to rescue a human character by stirring him safely to a paper boat. The game begins with a participant installing the Hoverlay app and then point to a manhole cover. Then virtual water comes out of it and occupies the space. A character and a paper boat emerge on the surface. The experience uses manhole covers located by the seashores, as a narrative thread to visualize in real-time the rise in water levels over the next 100 years, by using augmented reality on an accessible smartphone. This work is a performative exercise in visualizing an inevitable catastrophe that is yet to come.

The directors

Mathieu Pradat

Mathieu Pradat is a filmmaker working in the fields of virtual reality and cinema. Trained as an architect, his practice is rooted in the growing interaction between the virtual and real worlds, as territories carrying stories and emotions.
He explores both linear and interactive narrative forms. His projects have been selected for numerous festivals, including Mostra di Venezia – Venice Immersive, Cannes Immersive, GIFF (Geneva International Film Festival), B3 (Frankfurt Biennale) and the Locarno festival La Rotonde. Mathieu Pradat gives classes for AR/VR writing and staging at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and in high schools. He is a 2022 Villa Albertine laureate and a member of the Massachussets Institute of Technology’s Open Documentary Lab since 2022. In 2010, he founded La prairie productions, an immersive content and film production company. Mathieu Pradat lives in Marseille, is married and has one child.

Sahar Sajadieh

Sahar Sajadieh is a computational performance artivist (artist + activist) and theorist. She is a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts with a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sahar graduated with a dual BSc–BA degree in Computer Science and Theater from the University of British Columbia and received her Master’s Degree from the Performance Studies program at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. She was previously an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University. Sahar’s research lies at the intersection of computational arts, artificial intelligence, social justice-oriented design, and performance/media theory. She is interested in the creative and critical applications of natural language processing, machine learning, extended reality, and robotics as means of storytelling, poetic expression, and social intervention. For Sahar, art practice is a form of activism, a way to challenge the public’s comfort zone and provoke dialogues about difficult, unspoken issues in society. Her research focuses on making interactive technologies and artificial intelligence more alive and their societal applications more ethical.

General Informations

Directors : Mathieu Pradat & Sahar Sajadieh

Scenario : Mathieu Pradat

Production Company : La prairie productions

Year of creation : 2025

Selections : Layers of Place, MIT, Boston, April 7-18, 2025.

Incubated at the MIT Open Doc Lab.

Supported by Agog, MacArthur Foundation and Ford Foundation Just Films

Developped on Hoverlay.

Minimum Age : none

No dialogues

Technical Informations

Format : AR experience running on Hoverlay AR (Android & Ios).

Content : Climate Change, Raising Awareness, Game, Experiential.

Duration : 2 minutes 30

Number of participants per session : no limit

Equipment : a smartphone

Internet connection

Contact

mp@laprairie-atelier.fr

Trailer