Coney Island eat your heart out! You have GOT to have one of these! a just-deep fried soft pastry, then quickly drained & covered, smothered in fact, with sour cream, then topped with some delicious cheese, and splashed with some garlic oil goodness. Coronary explosion!
Lighting on the diorama. 40 watts I think, gold incandescent, around 40 degrees, looking over the left shoulder of the fish lady statue, out into the valley. difficult to see during the day. natural lighting is pretty powerful – oh well, can’t win ‘em all!
that’s great guys! festival is over. let’s go home now! … what? it hasn’t even begun you say! (this was the VIP night, after tomorrow it starts accommodating around 40,000 people daily.)
Meanwhile:
the blister on my left foot is really starting to make itself known.
I finally had some cold food for breakfast. as in, milk, with cereal. The only way I knew it was milk was because the reverse side of the container was in spanish (leche), otherwise the container itself is pretty deceiving.
it’s funny, collaborating with 15 people. I thought the point of having an iPod was so that you could listen to music non-stop for 3 months or something to that effect. so why is it that you hear the SAME FUCKING ALBUMS over and over again? (and I’m not only talking about this installation!)
I got the first light installed! A 3 ft. 35W fluorescent above the diorama. Of course, this is not the only lighting for the diorama, mostly for fill and for the ’sky’ (read below). There will also be a 50W or higher flood lamp installed from the side, probably at around 40-45 degrees, to give some harsh shadows and really bring out the shapes of the buildings, and to suggest an early morning rise!
We also tried to install the sky today, working with this inkjet printed canvas of a sky, just some clouds, blue and white, which we acquired from that film studio (the sky was originally from a nationalist political party billboard or something like that!). The test installation failed miserably. The original plan was just to ‘dome’ it over the diorama, but doing so really killed the light and created a terrible trapped mood. Even with a giant window (read below) it was difficult to digest.
So we scrapped that idea and so for the time being I moved on to making the viewing window. This one goes way back.
Months ago, while planning out the installation and starting work on the diorama, we started arguing points about the viewers’ experience, and of this window in particular. Daupo and I argued for a panoramic, wide, landscape style window, around four feet wide by ten inches tall, one pane of something clear like plexi, which would let the viewer keep moving but still gazing, and thus to move along the landscape and see it from different vantage points. Jean was pretty adamant that the window be tiny, round, and there only be one, like an airplane window, or porthole. He thought this would restrict the viewer to one vantage point – and this would be favorable somehow – and that it would also decrease the amount of time the viewer spends with this part of the installation, after all we need to keep people moving on this thing, we are surely to have a lot of punters! This debate was raised several times and went back and forth and back and forth. In situ, having constructed the diorama, it was obvious a lone porthole wouldn’t cut it. So we made the wide window and even then it seemed defeating. There wasn’t enough experience, and all the work put into this really layered work was lost with a wide but thin window that seemed restrictive to a viewer who had to be around 5′8″ for the optimal experience. Everybody else got shafted.
Soooooooo… we scrapped that window and re-framed it. I only got to move the bottom part (straight, rectangular), and drew out the top (curved, following the overall shape of the diorama itself) on a piece of plywood before the last train was near to arrive.
Kerry loaned me her watch, so I finally have a timepiece now, and an alarm. I stopped by a 24 hour supermarket which was only three times as big as my bedroom, but finally picked up some real food for the morning, so day 7 here I come! Armed with a digital watch and a full belly I hope!
This island is fucking transforming I tell you! It’s amazing how much infrastructure they’ve built here and how many pavilions have been constructed in such a short span! Oh, and that humongous 12-storey tall structure across the way from us, that’s a zip line to the other side of the festival! No shit! You go up, way up, then grab a zip line that will carry you several hundred feet and nearly to the terra firma, over the heads of the crowd enjoying a concert below! This place is fucking nuts!
On our installation front, not too much activity today. Got in late thanks to my roomies busting into my room at 5am, laughing and piling on top of me – that’s love for ya! Spent most of the day installing small detail work and fabricating the two town buildings that are supposed to be some future contemporary art museum in Budapest (the MEO perhaps? link to old NYTimes article) – can’t remember exactly. Also did several tests and only just before leaving figured out how to fabricate the skyways and pedestrian sky-tunnels and walkways around the city, using another odd foam material that’s slightly pliable and can be twisted between building structures.
after being late by some people’s standards yesterday, I was the first to arrive this morning, having just learned the transport route last night and acquiring my two week travel pass earlier today. I arrived sometime before 9:30am. It was nice to be all alone in the tent, the silence, the tools abandoned, the dust settled.
And ready to stir it all up again!
Today was a ‘big push’ day of sorts. Lots of new projects got devised, old ones got solved and a few leaps really happened! Emma arrived today, she’s an ex-Fluxer; she was a big help in re-fabricating the chain bridge for the diorama. Previously it was just held together with… fishing string? The bridge and model itself was a good idea but it wasn’t well constructed. I acquired some tiny jeweler’s chain and suggested that be the suspension, in an elegant V from tower to tower. The Frenchies who drove all the way from Paris made enormous progress on the facade of the tent, creating a high-contrast Constructivisty design using nothing but gaffers tape!; Ian and Adrian started designing and framing out the mezzanine-cafe-balcony-thing that people can pay a premium to experience (in addition to getting an ear-full from Morgan for an hour they’ll get certain views of the installation only experienced from the upper deck). And pretty major progress was made fabricating the ride cars, which will not simply be minimalist wood-frames but decked out with trim and picture frames I think we acquired from that film studio mentioned earlier. Regardless, they look hot!
it was a big push not only for us too. It seemed like in two-minutes flat just across the way from our tent many shirtless men had constructed this multi-multi-multi storied tall scaffolding thing, which none of us are sure yet what it’s for:
Work ended quite early, but for all the right reasons. We got invited to dinner! And this would likely be the only chance that we would all get to dine with each other, so it was really quite special.
A great restaurant quite near to my apartment, the owner prepared all of the food for us himself, and you can tell he poured his heart and soul into it. We started with some bread and appetizers, including this delicious ball of something that included egg and garlic and some sort of pastey goodness that held it all together, as well as serving a shot of brandy with shriveled prune! INTENSE! then we moved to the main course which for the vegetarian in me only included the portion of some delicious dish that was sort of like a pasta without the pasta or a curry and included some peppers which I don’t think I’ve ever had before, onions, garlic, and tomatoes, soaked up with more bread. we concluded with dessert which offered us a flat sugary dough with ground poppy seeds and I think honey, as well as some tarts and jam.
Afterwards we proceeded, already stumbling (and still close to my apartment thankfully, since I had forgotten my travelpass), to some rooftop bar. The weather was perfect, one never needed a coat but there was a constant breeze. And after I was jostled once the Hungarian crew learned of my lineage and inquired about my sobriquet, I was introduced to Unicum, which I had never heard of and so had never tasted. It is delicious! A unique and overwhelming nasal-clearing type of drink, but as Jakab, the director of the Hungarian Cultural Center so aptly put it, “It’s in your blood!”
continued work today in the studio fabricating buildings for the BPNY diorama for the upcoming project sziget (further reading hereherehere and here).
this stuff is slow-going, but I reckon the level of detail that can be achieved will make the work worthwhile. It’s a bit of a conundrum really. the diorama is and isn’t crucial to the overall project. it is because in a way it determines the placement of buildings and objects that will be engaged further on in our installation, but isn’t because it’s technically only supposed to be viewed for an approximate 15-20 seconds, not gawked at for endless minutes (like me once at the Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany where I gawked for so long at a diorama used for the King Kong vs T-Rex scene in the original 1933 film that eventually a staff attendant came up to me to ask if I was okay!). But I find myself pouring in countless hours to these little buildings because there isn’t much else we can do on this end, since we can’t ship anything large, or anything at all really (anything going into the show has to fit in our luggage!). And since we can’t really design the rest of the layout until we get a majority of the diorama constructed, and I have nothing but time for this now, thus I am spending lots of time for something that will receive little viewing time.
I can only reckon that once the thing is installed, that aside from the 8 days the installation is up, we will only have photos and documentation to account for the work, thus the level of detail will hopefully heighten any reception of the work absent of the physical work. the Flux Factory isn’t very good at archiving its physical remnants from exhibitions, and I hope to retrieve my personal contributions to the diorama for making extended works, so again hopefully time and detail now will payoff later.
the very very rough sense of scale we have going so far. This is probably around 33-35 sq. ft., with some room in the foreground and right side that you can’t see, and you can imagine with some buildings as small as my thumbnail, then we need a shedload of buildings!
all diorama-related photos up on my Flickr: Diorama Party
There was a talk at work earlier tonight and no matter how moved or excited I am by the talk and the discussions I invariably find myself more intrigued by the scattered array of the materials needed to make the talk and discussion, the juxtaposition and layout of tools, materials, wires, etc. that are used in order to fabricate events and which motivate human interaction and activity. Indeed if there were no wires, no computers, no projectors, people wouldn’t even show up anymore – we used to gather around campfires, now we gather around 2Ghz processors and 2500 lumens projectors. However don’t get me wrong, I’m completely in favor of the analog interpretation of this idea also: the notion reminds me of a piece I made for an exhibition in a domicile in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn last year, where I raked the basement dirt floor and exhibited all the found items, remnants of years, decades even, of previous activities:
