Rossum’s Original Band Of Tubas
The word ‘Robot’ was coined by the Czech playwright Karel Capek in his play, Rossum’s Universal Robots (RUR). However, my research showed that the term itself came from his earlier efforts to build Rossum’s Original Band Of Tubas (ROBOT), which I constructed a modern version of for my 2018 honorarium installation at Burning Man.
John Hollis’s drawing of the concept is shown on the home page; the photo above shows the realization. I happened to have 4 old tubas and two baritone horns, as one does, as well as 5 curved lamp posts, so the materials were at hand. Rob Liesenfeld and Bruce Koball did heroic work on the electronics. It could be played as a tuba band, from a MIDI keyboard mounted on a tricycle.
Bells of Vitruvius
In 2016, the theme of Burning Man was DaVinci’s Workshop. The Man effigy was a 40’ Homo Vitruvius mounted in a huge wheel atop a Renaissance basilica, and meant to be rotated on the hour by people on the ground. To call people to this task, four bell towers (campaniles) were constructed, and a competition was held to build bells for these campaniles.
I won the competition with generous help from Leonardo DaVinci, whose notebooks showed a possible bell mechanism. John Hollis drew the schematic above, showing the nautilis cam. It is driven by a windshield wiper motor controlled by a $3 ESP8622 computer programmed by Rob Liesenfeld.
The bells worked perfectly, though the Homo Vitruvius did not. After Burning Man, the bells were sold at the Burning Man’s Autumnal Gathering, and later the new owner showed a nicely painted one on the shore of Lake Tahoe.
Cult of the Can Opener
Burning Man 2013 had the theme ‘Cargo Cults’, after the South Pacific practice of building shrines to encourage airplanes to drop cargo to natives of the islands. We asked who is practicing a cargo cult in today’s world, who gives devotion in return for food? Dogs and cats, of course.
The honorarium project for this year was the ‘Cult of the Can Opener’, a circle of giant papier mache dogs and cats, dancing around a lady atop a refrigerator with a can opener. She is opening cans of ‘Holy Mackeral’, ‘Whale Giblets’, and the like. All these animals were adopted by burners and taken home.
Spirata Luminosa
In 2003 I again teamed with Jeremy Lutes to build this small fabric temple at Burning Man, my second honorarium, using custom made LED strips, with individual red, green, and blue LEDs.
Three color LEDs were barely available then, and the notion of color changing LED installations was brand new. It is all the rage now, of course, since commercial three color LED displays are commercial and cheap. The centerpiece of the installation is the plasma kaleidoscope, before it went to the Exploratorium.
I described this project in a talk at an elite arts organization in New York city, citing all sorts of totally imaginary sources for ‘Spirata Luminosa’; great fun!
Dances with lights
In 2001 I took a course in neon from Christian Schiess at The Crucible in Berkeley, before it moved to Oakland.
I experimented with fluorescent lights at that time, and found a way to excite them instantly with high frequency electricity. I told my friend Jeremy Lutes, also taking the course, and said that it would be cool to set up 10 of these at Burning Man. He disagreed, saying That I’d have to set up 200. So we did.
This was my first honorarium grant project with Burning Man, an arc of 192 4’ fluorescent lights at BM2002, all individually controlled from a PC, so they could make all sorts of programmed patterns.