Tag Archive for: trojan

Gift Horse Installation at ArtMRKT San Francisco

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Yesterday, Victoria Scott, my collaborator on the Gift Horse — a 13-foot high sculpture of the Trojan Horse — managed the installation of the giant sculpture for ArtMRKT San Francisco, from May 19th-May 22nd. Who wasn’t there? That’s right, me — I was busy installing my “2049” exhibition at The Dump — and am so thankful that Victoria was able to run this one out.

Here’s the morning load-up from Yosemite Studios. Tamara Albaitis and Noah Lang (special project manager at our gallery: Electric Works) and Victoria push the chest through the studio and into the freight elevator.
loading_from_studio

Here, Noah Lang is assembling panels while listening to a reading of Homer’s Odyssey for inspiration.
noah_assembles

Jessica (the fourth member of the crew) assembles panels on the hexagonal wheels.
jessica_wheels

Here the horse stands naked before being panelled.
framework

And in its final form, the horse, peers through the entrance to ArtMRKT — come and see it, along with all the other great art at this new San Francisco art fair!
completed_looking

01SJ Day 10: Horse Nearly Panelled

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More viruses for the Gift Horse. Thanks to the docents of the San Jose Museum of Art and also the ZERO1 volunteers, we finished off 100 viruses today.

docents_making

Meanwhile, we began final fittings of exterior panels for the horse, after picking up the last reprints from the ever-patient folks at Electric Works, art gallery and press in San Franciscio. Due to inevitable minute differences between the virtual and the real, we had to cut some to fit, especially all of the leg panels. Sharpie marks on the back are the standard way to indicate what goes where.
legs_marking

11:30pm and Victoria is at it again with the jigsaw. You can see the nearly-finished Trojan Horse in the background.
v_sawing

Crap! I mismeasured one of the leg panels and cut off more then I should. My heart sank.

scott_badcut

…but I was saved by an off-cut leg panel, which fitted magically where this one was to be placed. It was clearly time to have a beer and go to sleep.

scott_saved

01SJ Day 8: Workshopping the Viruses

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Today was a busy day with Gift Horse where we spent much of the day talking and working with the public and at the end of it, I was both happy and exhausted.

Out first helpers were Maria and Cecilia, two art students from San Jose State. They stayed and each built four viruses and even conquered the most difficult one to construct: Koobface.

two__girl_students

Here Joanna and Jennifer are demonstrating the proper technique for placing their viruses in the belly of the horse.

two_women_placing

My non-scientific observation was that Cooties was the most popular choice of virus.
cooties_closeup

And Rabies, which this gentleman  is gluing together, was oft-selected.
guy_building

Throughout the day, we got a steady stream of visitors to the virus-construction table.
group_shot

After 5 hours of leading workshops (meanwhile, Victoria was cutting, fitting and adjusting the panels), we ran out of viruses. I rushed to my date with the laser-cutter and sliced and scored out 75 more in anticipation of tomorrow’s day. The lasercutter is the best thing ever.
lasercutting_rabies
Here is a sheet of Andromeda Strain, which is the easiest one and is essentially like a 4-sided Dungeons and Dragons die (three, glued together)

lasercutting_andromeda

Meanwhile, all day we could hear the pounding of hammer against nails as our neighbors, MTAA, constructed their Art Barn.
artbarn_mtaa

No complaints though, this is the Garage experience that we has planned for and we found ourselves taking short breaks and joking around with the other artists throughout the day.

By 7pm, the horse had about 100 viruses in it. Its getting there, but still lots more virus-building to do!
viruses_in_belly

01SJ Day 5: Public Viruses

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Today we shifted to the virus-making portion of Gift Horse, where anyone can assemble a virus sculpture to be placed inside the belly of the Trojan Horse. The gesture is to gather people in real space, give them a way to hand-construct their “artwork” and to hide hundeds of the mini-sculptures inside the horse.

The first virus to go inside, the Rat of the Chinese zodiac, was The Andromeda Strain, an imaginary virus from the film. This father-daughter team cut, folded and glued the paper sculpture together and she did the honors of secreting it inside the armature.

father_daughter
daughter_places
It takes a long time to cut each virus from the printed sheet. This is where the lasercutter from the Tech Shop came in handy. In the afternoon, we traced the outlines of the Snow Crash virus and tried cutting it out. After about an hour of fiddling around with settings and alignment, I was able to get a batch done.
lasercutter

many_snowcrashes

Hurray for mechanized production!

This halved the assembly time from 30 minutes to 15 minutes, bypassing the tedious cutting step. Perhaps this is a compromise in the process of hand-construction techniques, but I’ll gladly make the trade-off for practicality.

The next person to sit with us was Jeff who worked on one of the freshly-cut Snow Crash viruses.

jeff_builds

Once finished, it joined The Andromeda Strain. Come on down to South Hall (435, S. Market, San Jose) and check us out — we will be holding workshops on building viruses all weekend.

andromeda_snowcrash

01SJ Day 4: Out of the Garage, Into the Parking Lot

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Compared to last night’s construction frenzy, today was calm and involved detail work and time on the computer to preparing the paper viruses sculptures.

The horse did venture outside of South Hall and we were both anxious about whether or not it would fit through the 14-foot high rollup doors. We had taken measurements and had planned to make it with just 2 inches of clearance. But you never know about human error.
horse_exiting
clearance
Once again, the 3D model corresponded to reality. Phew.

Although the wooden armature is beautiful by itself, the printed wood panels that make up the exterior cladding will be stunning. But, the environment at South Hall is too dusty (our neighbors are both sawing lots of wood), so we are beginning what we can the “stagecraft” portion of the project — creating the illusion that the horse will appear like a 3D model. Here, we are painting what will be the spaces between printed panels, so that you see black in between. This will make more sense in a couple days.
stagecraft

01SJ Day 3: Armature Assembly

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The first part of the day was what I’ve often experienced while making projects onsite: several runs to box hardware stores looking around for the right fittings and being horribly inefficient. By mid-afternoon we hit our stride and fortunately, all the measurements we made in the Sketchup model of the Gift Horse translated perfectly to real life. Astounding.

By late afternoon we were finally assembling the wagon for the giant Trojan Horse, which will be pushed during the Green Prix parade on Saturday, September 18th by many costumed Greek Warriors. Later in the day, the horse will be “gifted” to the San Jose Art Museum, where it will join the Retro-Tech exhibition.

sandv_wagon_working

sworking_onwagon

Here is the wagon, finished and stable. It wheeled around quite easily.

finished_wagon

By now it,was 7pm and we were exhausted but we wanted to start assembling. We got help from last night’s dinner crew and constructed the main body of the Gift Horse.

headlesshorse

crew_looking_athorse

horse_nonose

A headlesss horse wouldn’t do. We soldiered on and affixed with the head piece followed by the nose.

putting_on_nose

nose_done

Finally, a finished horse armature! Stay tuned, we’ll be putting on the panels in the next several days.

assembled

Foot-in-Mouth and More

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This is a family of eight paper virus sculptures for the Gift Horse project, which has 12 more days to go as a Kickstarter project. You can donate here.

Top row (left to right): Andromeda Strain, Tobacco Mosaic Virus, T-Virus (from Resident Evil), Rabies, Smallpox
Bottom row: Foot-in-mouth disease, Snow Crash, Dengue Fever

Virus All_screen

The synopsis: Victoria Scott and myself are building a 13-foot high Trojan Horse for the 01SJ Biennial to celebrate the viral nature of art and ideas. For 10 days before the event, we will be leading public workshops where we will teach anyone to build a virus using basic papercraft techniques of cutting, folding, and gluing.

The hundreds of viruses will go into the belly of the horse and will be released into the San Jose Museum of Art on September 18th in a boisterous public ceremony.

Gift Horse-in-progress

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After the first month, we are 31% funded on the 13-foot-high Gift Horse for the 01SJ Biennial. A good initial run, but its starting to feel a little tight, so please consider a Kickstarter donation to the Gift Horse project.

gift_horse_3d

We have been busy working on the internal structure and final models in Sketchup. The skeleton proved to be an advanced wood project since the exterior printed digital panels (see model above) will be exactly fitted to make it look like giant-sized 3D model of a horse.

Working with our friend, Rob Bell, we have come up with this preliminary Sketchup design, which will be computer-cut with his ShopBot. This awesome piece of machinery, along with his expert skills, takes the 3D files and makes exactly the shape we need from a sheets of 4×8 wood.

TroHo_partial_sketchup

We’re trying to build this as sustainably as possible with recycled wood and a bioboard cladding. This makes it more expensive, so again, please consider a donation to help us complete this project.

Finally, it will be stuffed full of viruses. Paper viruses, that is.

gift_horse_virus