Have you had any new art projects lately?
Yes, I'm working on a new project that I'm really excited about. Thanks for asking! I'm collaborating with 3 other folks to do a project that considers the horizon line.
Background: We were really fascinated with the horizon in NV because it's the most mountainous state in the continental US, and you can see the horizon in 360* because there's so few trees. Further, we started thinking about how horizons are illusions (you never reach them, they change based on perspective/location/etc.), but we make many very real decisions about how we navigate the world based on these illusions. So we've been looking for new ways to consider the concept of the horizon, and translate it into other media.
The project: So we're building a large marimba (currently a 5' tester, to be followed by a full one that's 20' long). A marimba is like a wooden xylophone. So we photographed various 360* panoramas of NV horizons, and traced out lines. Instead of the marimba having the traditional tapering shape, we're building one that has one of the recorded horizon lines cut across the top of the bars. We've standardized our process of constructing the bars so that the determining factor of the sound that each bar of the marimba makes is the length of the bar. As such, the horizon line is determining the sound of the instrument.
Then we're going to build a shuttle that moves on a track, which will be controlled by a computer that's reading weather data from the site where the horizon line exists. The shuttle will have the mallets attached to it, with little motors causing them to "roll" on the bars. The speed of the rolling mallets will be determined by a live feed of the temperature. As temp increases throughout the day, the mallets will roll faster. So daily and seasonally, the music will change. As ambient pressure changes throughout the day, so will the "pressure" of how hard the mallets strike the bars. The shuttle will move back and forth along the bottom of the marimba according to the changes in wind speed and direction.
Essentially, the weather will be playing the landscape to make a song. Here's an old pic of some bars I cut for the 5' long marimba. The 20'er will have more dramatic changes in bar size due to scale.
truck with a lumber rack?
By the way, I have a lumber rack on my Blazer. I'll rarely haul much in terms of lumber with it, since I'll be doing more project management than carpentry. I'll do some labor, probably on a daily basis, but I'll be filling in and helping our laborers rather than doing this all the time. I imagine I'll regularly carry ladders up there tho. Primarily I need the truck for hauling a small trailer.


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And thanks.