HOW TO GO
WHAT: Oxford Kinetics Festival
WHERE: Millett Hall at Miami University, 500 E. Sycamore St., Oxford
WHEN: Noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, April 19. The Dog's Breakfast race will begin at 11:30 a.m.
COST: Free
MORE INFO: Call 513-461-3096 or visit www.oxfordkineticsfestival.org
Attendance for the annual Oxford Kinetics Festival more than doubled between 2013 and 2014, from 1,000 to 2,500 people, according to organizers. Now in its fifth year, co-directors Rod Northcutt and Katie Currie hope that attendance doubles yet again for the Sunday, April 19, event.
“I keep feeling like 4,000 people, but who knows?” Currie said.
“I’d be happy with 6,000,” joked Northcutt.
As the name suggests, this unique festival celebrates energy in motion. If you can build something that moves, it counts. While bicycle-based contraptions are perhaps the most popular, innovators occasionally produce items as unique as a mobile shadow puppet theatre. Because the primary objective of the festival is to build community, everyone, not just hobbyist artisans, are encouraged to participate.
“We want to give people the opportunity to innovate and complement the demonstrations at the festival,” Northcutt said.
In order to prevent people from building the same types of things from year to year, every festival has a theme. The theme for this year’s festival will be “Flight of the Flyer,” with participants invited to create something built around the theme of flight.
“We’ll have a model of the original Wright B Flyer,” Northcutt said. “You’ll see all kinds of things relating to getting off the ground, including hot-air balloons, biplanes and space flight.”
The Scramble race, a bike-based obstacle course where competitors have to dismount at five stations to perform a wacky task, is a signature event of the festival every year.
The Scramble’s popularity has grown so large that this year’s event will offer two offshoots of the obstacle course. One is a course for children younger than 18 and family teams.
“One of the stations for that one involves bees and cross-pollination,” Currie said. “They’ll have to put on antennae, wings, bug-out glasses, and Velcro straps on their legs. They’ll have to go around, pick up pollen on those straps, then carry it to another flower and pollinate it.”
The other is an “alley cat”-type Scramble bike course called “The Dog’s Messenger,” the only festival event that will be spread throughout the Oxford area. It is open to participants 16 and older on human-powered contraptions.
“Speed isn’t important, just your ability to go to multiple points using different routes,” Northcutt said. “Bike messengers or people just used to biking in urban areas will get it.”
Other activities at the festival this year will include live music and a film festival, where movies will be projected onto vellum attached to the storefront windows of several local businesses.
Currie said the festival is meant to be fun for all ages and adds art to the idea of STEM education — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
“It takes STEM to STEAM, adding art, art and creative making,” she said. “Seeing kids see adults play and have fun makes me happy. It’s a day of interaction with everyone having fun. Kids think that kids play adults are grumpy.”
She said the science part is important, but they want to see creativity.
“We talk about creative science a lot, not just creative art,” she said. “There is a lot of creative thinking in every field. That’s where you bring in diverse people. We have a lot of help from the science department at Miami. We are not in the science field. We’re artists.”
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