GALAXY, part 3
/I wrote in last Friday’s post that I intended to continue to work on my epic art installation for a burn that was likely to be canceled — that was tough to write, because even as I wrote it I knew that at 6:00 pm that evening I would click ‘send’ on the burn newsletter, the Alchemist, announcing the cancellation. The release of that news was coordinated between the Event Committee, the Board of Directors, and the Information Committee, and the operation was flawless. Yay us, I guess.
And I meant it: I will continue to work on the project. Instead of faking it, I could have written a regular Fun Friday Resources post then announced today that I was abandoning GALAXY due to the cancellation. But I am excited by GALAXY, and frankly the project can make good use of the year we’ve been given to develop it.
So onward we go.
I’d like to point out a detail from the three ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS that I posted on Friday. After being inspired by the photograph in The Art of Tinkering, I knew that I wanted a glittering field of these glowing rings, arranged in some swoopy pattern that would entice the strolling hippie to wander through its “randomness” in a multiplicity of ways.
First, some geography:
This is what I call the “peeking map.” It’s for the hippies to go look at the layout of the burn and decide where they’d like to have their camp placed. (I am the Benevolent Placement Overlord™, aka the Placement Lead, for the burn. (If you’re interested in my burn design philosophy, here’s my manifesto.)
On the left/west, the Effigy is the big thing we burn on Saturday night. All the way across the burn is the Temple, which burns on Sunday. Along the axis in between are the City Center, an art plaza, and a couple of art burn plazas.
That oval with the two blue art burn plazas in it is “Lake Ruby,” so called because it becomes a shallow lake after a heavy rain; a movie crew named it after their production manager. (We burn in Wakanda, if that interests you.) I can’t place camps there because they’d be underwater if it rained. So it’s this big empty, useless field smack in the middle of the burn, like a barren Central Park.
Artists are beginning to catch on, though, and I wanted to claim my turf this year with GALAXY.
Here’s a close-up of Lake Ruby:
The white squiggle is for scale; it’s not what GALAXY is going to look like when it’s finished. That is 100 feet long. Impressive, right?
Anyway, after I made the ABORTIVE ATTEMPT #2, I wanted a way to explain (to myself) what the difference was in the two, and so I made the graph at the top of the page for each one. Here they are:
Each of these is assuming a hippie strolling from east to west, i.e., toward the Effigy (the big thing we burn on Saturday night). My intent is to have loosely grouped clusters with paths between them, i.e., definite paths but with the opportunity to slip in between the “stars,” as it were, if the hippie cares to.
In the first concept, the clusters of light swell and diminish as we wander through the installation, petering out and releasing the participant to go on their way.
In the second, the swelling/diminishing finally dissipates as the rings stop following any pattern and just scatter across the field, leaving the participant with a universe of choices of exiting.
In the third, of course, the star field organizes itself into a spiral labyrinth.
From my notes:
It seems unlikely that we will be able to develop a specific layout, much less be able to replicate it. [i.e., I will never be able to create a map of which ring goes where, and even if I did, who’s going to have the patience to follow it?]
Hippies tripping over the art is always a concern.
To help simplify construction, I probably need to limit the rings to 3–4 diameters.
The three ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS are in fact each perfectly cromulent and can be implemented at different burns.
That last comment was liberating. Onward.
