The GALAXY Project (part 17)

Five days until the Alchemy Art Fundraiser, and boy do I have an update for you!

GALAXY Project Chief Engineer Turff (aka “Tool”) has been completely absorbed in working out the electrical power details, and to that end has constructed Zone 1 in its entirety.

Here:

Turff has divided the “spine” of the piece into seven zones, i.e., independently powered lengths of wire, each with four connection boxes, and each of those has seven “dendrites” connecting the rings.

Doing the math, we find that 7 zones x 4 boxes/zone x 7 rings/box = 196 rings. Perfect.

So Turff has manufactured Zone 1. He’s chafing to keep going, but I’ve reminded him that we could wait until after the fundraiser to do more. For one thing, we may actually have teams of people who sign up at the fundraiser to help. Plus funding.

Let me say at this point how very odd it is for me to be doing essentially nothing on the project while Turff makes the magic happen. This never happens, and I have to express profound gratitude to Turff for being as driven as I am to make this thing real.

What have I been doing? Putting together the science fair triboard, creating the “recipe cards” for layout (see below), and a video using footage from Turff.

Because I didn’t want YouTube’s copyright trolls to snag the video, I didn’t attach any music to the video — and I may end up composing something — but for our purposes you can just bring up this video of the group Wild Up performing Julius Eastman’s Femenine (No. 1.Prime) and let it play as you watch my video. (It’s already set at the 2:55 mark, which is probably as good a point as any.) (Any ambient music would do, obviously.)

Is this not the coolest thing ever? Remember, this is just Zone 1: there are another 168 rings still to come! Will the hippies not be impressed? Dazzled? Entranced?

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I told Turff that I am not interested in treating the layout in the design as an ironclad plan for installing the rings. As long as the rings are in the same order of smalls, mediums, and larges, the precise placement is irrelevant. After some discussion, we’ve gone with his plan of having “recipe cards” which we place on the boxes, which then the installation team uses to distribute the appropriate rings. (Turff has it in his head that we can reconfigure the basic structure into further art works, which is great. [We also have Phase II and III to think about, and I can tell you now that the more technologically-minded hippies are going to start salivating about sequencing software and sound installations as soon as they see it.])

The recipe cards became my task, of course, and it was fun. Here they are:

They’ll be laminated by the weekend. Onward!