No, America, don’t start packing your rifles and booking flights. For a start, we barely have a bus service, never mind an airport; and for a next, these are fluffy, woolly, bedtime buddies with no teeth. I’m a bit late getting this up on the wall due to knowing nothing about the charity trail until a couple of hours ago.

Not art, though, is it?

Admittedly not, more physics really, because that’s what underpins most things. But when an augmented reality teddy bear halfway up the side of a building is called for, a science lesson isn’t really going to cut it. It’s unarguably the case that, without this art training, this door opened into a different kind of creative thinking, that bear wouldn’t be flying high with a message about a fundraiser for a vital pre-school service for local kids.

In-app test recording of an AR piece for our local school fundraiser. It’s live now; view safely via the #Artivive app from behind the bollards across the road.

Credits: Bez the Bear highjacked pictorially from the very best newsagent in the universe, Sue Plautz of Beeding High Street.

© Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2025