Students part of a class titled “Vonnegolf” spent eight weeks planning, designing and creating five mini golf holes to bring to life at this spring’s Granfalloon Festival.
Each hole in the course represents a major plot point in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel “Cat’s Cradle.” Course instructor Maxwell Fertik said his favorite part of the project was combining his love of satire and reading with his love of art and design. IU junior Mia Birkenbeul said as soon as she learned the class involved making a mini golf course, she knew she wanted to choose it for her intensive seminar credit.
The comprehensive design class was a collaboration between the IU Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design and the IU Arts and Humanities Council, which hosts Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Convergence. Granfalloon is an annual festival inspired by Vonnegut, an Indiana native. The festival began in 2018 and features various performances, talks, screenings and art. The festival events will take place throughout April, May and June around IUB’s campus, the city of Bloomington and Indianapolis.
Fertik said he acted as more of a “project manager” than a teacher for the class because the students were working with a real client. All 13 comprehensive design students in the class read “Cat’s Cradle” before the semester began.
“Cat’s Cradle” is a science-fiction novel filled with satire and absurdism that tells the story of a writer researching the creation of the atomic bomb. He encounters a made-up religion called Bokononism and a dangerous substance called ice-nine.
The students were split into four groups for the project: concept, graphic design, design and fabrication. Fertik said the concept group devised the “overarching narrative” of each hole. Afterward, this group worked with the design group to create computer-aided designs. The fabrication team took these designs and worked to translate the computer drawings into real-life mini golf holes.
Birkenbeul worked on designing the third hole and said the most challenging aspect of the design process was taking a pictureless book and creating visual elements out of it.
“Being in the design field, you're already thinking of these design elements like every page,” Birkenbeul said. “Kind of like when you're reading a book and you're creating a picture in your mind, that was what helped us visualize this without anything.”
The atom bomb hole, which will be placed near Soma Coffeehouse and Juice Bar on Kirkwood Avenue, features a bomb replica, billowing clouds of grey smoke and spinning radioactive sign obstacles.
The second hole, modeled after the Hoenikker mystery, is shaped like a question mark and will be near the Monroe County Public Library. Felix Hoenikker is the main antagonist in “Cat’s Cradle.” He played a key role in the atomic bomb’s development and created ice-nine. The “mystery” refers to the questions about science and morality prompted by his character.
The third hole, displaying the plane to San Lorenzo atop long blue turf, will be found near the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. At the Waldron Arts Center, festival-goers can putt the Ice-9 hole. This hole is riddled with cracked ice obstacles and has a wooden floor.
The final hole of the “Vonnegolf” experience will be near the Monroe County Courthouse. It focuses on the Book of Bokonon and takes the ball down a sort of vortex before spitting it out underneath several arches that look like legs touching their feet together. According to Fertik, this represented something similar to “prayer” in the book.
The graphic design team helped compile a series of designs for the project, including a zine, poster and mini golf score sheet. The zine describes the mini golf holes as “a nonsensical mini golf experience,” and includes signatures modeled after Vonnegut’s. A side profile outline of each student, Fertik and Vonnegut are featured on the back cover of the zine.
Fertik said working collaboratively and with a real client caused “an additional level of pressure” that helped bring out “a different kind of excitement.”
Birkenbeul was on the design and fabrication teams. She said her favorite part of the project was the collaboration with her classmates.
“You can’t make a mini golf course if you’re not collaborating, so that was a really key part,” Birkenbeul said.
The different groups worked together to ensure each design was accurate to the book’s narrative, Birkenbeul said.
Students were in class working on the holes six hours each week but spent extra hours coming in to work on the holes and sourcing materials.
“Being in the woodshop fifteen hours a week certainly brought us closer,” Birkenbeul said. “Learning new things from my peers is really fun.”
Fertik said he hopes this project will make his students stand out and give them something “really good” for their portfolios.
Fertik and other comprehensive design department faculty came up with the idea to collaborate with Granfalloon. This is the first time Eskenazi and Granfalloon have done a collaborative class and Fertik said he would “totally” teach a class with Granfalloon as a client again.
The intensive seminar course has not built a mini golf course before, but previously created installations on campus, such as in the courtyard of the Mies van der Rohe Building, Fertik said. One intensive seminar option called “MyMachine” connects comprehensive design students with local second graders. The IU students design their ideas, and a local vocational school brings the prototypes to life.
“It felt like a really good professional experience in a way, like getting ready to work on a big project in my career going forward,” junior Josie Kreitenstein said.
Several of the mini golf holes will be displayed at the First Thursday event from 4-7 p.m. April 3. The holes will be on display for the Granfalloon festival from June 6-8.
