Installation part deux

So, after my first installation, I got real excited about getting onto a bigger scale and effecting more people at once so I started looking for ideas.  The perfect place was right in front of our studios in a large concrete open space with a building on one side, and a bunch of light wells on the other.  Nobody ever used the space, and I always liked it and wanted to sit there so it was on.

What was missing was a roof, and a sense of enclosure for people to think that they should go there and actually stay there.  So after lots of ideas came and went, we finally settled on balloons.  We would create a roof out of balloons some how.  It could have been helium and a big net or lots of strings on the ground forming a grid, and all sorts of other things.  I finally came up with the idea of rigging a structure of fishing line from the building on one side and the light wells on the other and having it touch down on the ground on specific spots as to denote where people should congregate.  Then after the structure was set, we would infill it with balloons.

You can see the fish line there just barely.

So we set about doing it and there was lots of climbing on buildings and scaling things to tie the line to random places.  All the lines connected to eachother and made a very complex and spontaneous 3d spider web.  We had no specific plan for where each line went, but as we went along and were stringing them up, we could pull the whole thing in the directions we wanted and such.  

Then we got an air compressor and blew up 2,000 balloons and tied them as long strings together on pieces of fishing line, which could then be put up between the facets created by the spider web structure.  many hours and lots of balloons and air later, we had gotten most of them up, and realized we needed more balloons, so we went back and bought 1,000 more to finish off the whole thing.  

Then we set up lots of spotlights above the floating mass to light them up and create as surreal of an environment as possible.  The variations in brightness and shadow was great, and made it feel like you were under water or something.  People called them fish eggs, clouds, cotton balls, and all sorts of other things.

To top it all off, a bunch of our friends played jazz for us and we brought a bunch of food and booze for everyone to enjoy while existing in our newly created world.  It took 3,000 balloons, about 30 people, one night and one day, and only one wild idea to make it work.