Mike's Spacetime

I wrote this report post-event out of my memory as it is still relatively fresh and hasn’t quite evaporated into the vaults of my brain forever to remain hazy and altered. I’ll recall the events as they happened from my point of view, this is by no means an objective report of how the cube came to be. Sadly i did not have time to really blog the progress of the cube as it went along – i was far too busy fitting work, cube, moving house, and general BM prep all into 24 hours a day.

The first time I heard of the cube idea was probably from Barry just before the Whistler trip in 2009, I don’t know exactly where or when, it was at that point nothing then a fancy idea, amongst many others, to build a giant Rubik’s cube on the playa. I didn’t think much of it back then, as it was just another crazy idea amongst many which has been tossed around for some time. I had my own ideas concerning injecting a Meme into the Burn this year, and letting it evolve like a giant game of Chinese whispers, but i never quite figured out how to make that go in a practical sense even though i found the concept intriguing.

The idea for the cube was born during the new-years Whistler trip, which I missed due to being in German with Alissa and my parents, and was first suggested by Chris White, who ended up writing most of the software for the project.

Anyway, the topic came up again during the Febuary/March whistler trip, Barry, Chris, Mars and others had been starting to pour in more thought into it, imagining a large, scaffolding based structure, covered in fabric, 48ft high, lit up by lamps and gels. Emphasis was on “simple”. off-the-shelf parts only. My own thoughts started to engage in this – i realized this could become a very engaging project, maybe a unique opportunity to get involved in a very very large art installation with group more then capable of pulling it off.

In particular i recall standing in the kitchen with Barry during one of the many parties up in the Whistler cabin talking about possible ways to control the cube. We were imagining a controller standing in the center of the cube, thus being able to see all the sides of the cube. The problem with this was that it was too isolated an experience, only a single or very few people could stand in the cube, and the outside observers wouldn’t even realize that it was a human being controling the cube ! My thoughts started to ponder ways to make the experience wider, allow more players into the game and make it obvious how and who is controlling the cube. As always with ideas i just blurted out stuff as it occured to me – i said “what if we split the controllers into three parts”. Barry’s eyes lit up like – he said something like “oohhh that is EVIL – have one controller per axis!”. I think neither of us had any doubt at that point that we simply had to make this happen. The idea with the distributed controllers had, to me, elevated the project from a simple light sculpture, or even interactive light sculpture, into a enhanced version of a famous puzzle, one that required coorperation between multiple players and was much much harder then the original. I was sold.

- Mike