Wantalon

Open to anyone who is interested in art and likes to move.

Wantalon is an art project by Petra Mattheis, whose basic idea was born during the Corona pandemic, when museums and galleries were closed. Wantalon aims to create an art trail in public space that exists and can be visited independently of indoor spaces, taking users by the hand to walk with them through the city. The app acts as a mediator between public space and art, turning the city into a large-scale gallery. It shows artistic interventions in places that are normally considered obstacles, such as ruins, wastelands and vacant lots, and aims to encourage people to walk through the city off the beaten track.

Treat Yourself to the App

The app is free, without ads and does not track you:
👉 Wantalon in the App Store
👉 Wantalon on Google Play

The interactive map guides you to the stations, which are automatically unlocked when you get close to them. You can view images and text about each station and send digital postcards once you have visited a certain number of stations.

For more information, visit wantalon.net.

#zeitzseeing

The first Wantalon course is called #zeitzseeing and takes place in the small town of Zeitz in the south of Saxony-Anhalt. The two artists Petra Mattheis and Sascha Nau have created a photographic tour, a personal view of the city. Stations can be discovered and collected using the central map. Those who collect more than five stations can send a digital postcard from Zeitz.

Technology

Hybrid App in Frontend

Under the hood, I developed a web application using the Ionic Framework. Ionic itself consists of Capacitor, an open source runtime for developing web-native applications, a frontend framework such as React or Vue.js, and custom Ionic components for the chosen frontend framework. Being a Vue enthusiast, I picked up Ionic with Vue.

The idea behind Ionic components is to mimic the look and feel of native Android and iOS apps. Since Wantalon has its own design style, hardly any Ionic components were used. I created most of the controls myself.

I use Vite as a bundler for the web app. Over time, a kind of best practice approach to web applications grew. Maybe I can reuse the core without the business logic for another app or release it as open source.

Within the web app, we use Mapbox for the map views, among other things.

Kirby CMS in the Backend

The backend and CMS of choice is Kirby CMS, from which the application retrieves the relevant data using the Kirby Query Language API.

Since Kirby is not well-designed for use as a headless CMS by default, I used the Kirby plugin Kirby Headless, which was developed in the course of another project. It allows me to flexibly load data even in a multilingual context. With a Vue composable, I can then retrieve lazy data for individual pages in the frontend.

• Kirby Headless: Kirby plugin to load token-based KQL data, also suitable for multilingual Kirby installations
• Nuxt KQL