This article is a little choppy. But stay with me. The universe flows with its own currents. I have written it as a three part series: “Inception,” “The Making,” and “Execution” to document the process of putting together an installation art project.
Stage I: Inception
Imagine a greenhouse. It’s a sweltering muggy day, and you’re inside a plastic bubble, swimming in 115 degrees, skin flaking like an old tree bark. You’re making art, and it’s a mess – a beautiful mess.
We saw the first rendition of the Multibubble on a cool May evening. It’s spring in Kansas, and one of those amazing to be outdoors kind of night. The last Friday of the month, teeming with art gallery crawlers, food trucks and craft beer. We were there to stake out the installation because we had been invited to participate in creating it in July.
The bubble is glowing, and the light inside makes you curious. We see half-finished to fully realized works of art inside, and we start making plans for the summer.
Its suddenly July.
The Multibubble installation will be part of the Wichita Mini Maker Faire. Indoors, several makers will have their booths with things they make, demonstrations, show and tell, Q and A, and the Multibubble will be staged outside, at the festival plaza. People can walk into the bubble, and experience a diverse interpretation of a bubble universe.
Here’s our plan so far.
The bubble will be a world of its own. The ceiling will be painted like a starry sky. White balloons covered in fluff will look like low hanging clouds. People would have to move the clouds out of the way to see the starry sky. Around the perimeter of the bubble, a cardboard city will light up as people walk by, and in the center, will be a monument, a giant cylindrical mirror. It looks amazing in our heads, and like a 3rd grader’s drawing in paper. From the outside, it’s a 9 x 9 x 9 ft. cuboid.
The scale of our observable universe, is so big and so small. The distance between galaxies are astronomical, too large to fathom, while the distance between subatomic particles are only nanometers apart, too small to sense. Between these scales, lie all human perceptions, our sense of sight and hearing, limited to a few nanometers of visible wavelengths and a few kHz of audible wavelengths. Yet we try to understand all things big and small with telescopes, microscopes and instruments that help make sense of our observations. We are like the people in the allegory of the cave, our entire understanding, made of shadows.
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