Mike's Spacetime

The last few days in whistler my brain started to stir – i was starting to consider the ideas that had been thrown around and we started looking on the internet for parts, costs, figures and numbers. We set our budget was 10K- it seemed that despite the very short amount of time we had available we may be able to raise enough. Nobody questioned that we couldn’t do it for less.

The first few considerations involved establishing if we were at least int the right order of magnitude for this project to fly. Our initial, first design involved a tower, with a 24ft x 24ft base, 48 ft high, built out of standard scaffolding. It would be subdivided into cubies (the lingo didn’t exist at the time but cubie would later signify a single sub cube, with up to 3 facets on it ), each cubie would be 8ft x8ft8ft in size. The tower would have 6  8ft levels and be 3×3 cubies at the base. I started making some initial drawings:

The problem was that with the cube having one of it’s faces parallel to the ground, the opposite face would be impossible to see. We imagined having a plattform on top for this purpose, however it couldn’t be too large either or it itself would occlude that top face. Or maybe a seperate tower nearby ? That would be a major extra undertaking, to build *another* 45 ft structure ?

At the time we were imagining the controller for the vertical axis to be sitting below the cube, with the other two controllers out, some distance at 90 degrees from each other. With the cube itself raised 16ft off the ground, they couldn’t be too far away or they would barely be able to see the bottom.

None of us had ever built anything even remotely of this size so we wanted to keep everything simple. Simple scaffolding, simple lighting, simple controllers and electronics. At that point we had only 7 months until the man would burn, so were really didn’t have time to make any custom manufactured stuff.

We started researching costs. Fabric and scaffolding were the first big unknowns. We established that fabric would be a limiting factor – with a cube 24ft on a side, we had an area of 3500 sq ft to cover. We found some information on a related project called the Tetrion (Large towers of scaffolding in the shape of tetris pieces, covered in fabric lit from the inside, which featured at the 2008 burn) which was very much along the same lines of what we were trying to do. We had worked out that they had used “Rosebrand stretch tendo”, a special, two stretch spandex material. Clearly their project had worked clearly this stuff was suitable for the playa. But we were looking at 2500$ minimum, just for the fabric. Looking at scaffolding, lighting and  one idea included stretching the fabric, thus reducing the amount we needed considerably (by 40% or so!) but we didn’t know how much it would stretch.
Scaffolding too started to explode in terms of cost but also in terms of manageability. 8ft spans are awkward to work with, since most people can only reach about 7ft with their hands.
We could make the cube smaller, but then it would loose much of its impact factor. Barry insisted it should not be smaller then 15ft on a side. Reducing it to that size would slash material costs quite substantially, and maybe with the cube smaller we could add a new twist: putting the cube on its corner.

- Mike