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LIGHT_OF_RA
September 5, 2007
My project this year:
Dangerbaby and I made an
attempt at doing a night-time
cafe dedicated to Sun Ra
music, with an accompanying
light show of sorts.
Before going I put a fair
amount of work into Much more so than some
programming the music. people with enormous
sound systems: in one There's no way
I re-listened to around mix I heard a UK Squeeze a human DJ would've
fifty Sun Ra releases, cut then a few tracks done that:
considering each track later, another UK Squeeze
through the lens of cut, off of the same Ah, the joys
an imagined Burning Man album. of the iPod
audience. What would shuffle.
grab a beginner's ear,
what would be too far Now we can
outside, what might claim acoustic
work at different times territory
in different atmospheres. without *any*
thought...
just money
for a sound
system.
This all grew out off
these observations:
o Our camp's dome was largely
unused at night.
o The music at Burning man often seems weak and narrow
(techno-house and, now, top-40 and very little else),
plus
Burner's seem strangely ignorant of the ways of Sun Ra.
an exaggerated
perception?
I found 3 in
our camp who
were, shall
we say, "hep",
unbeknowst to
me.
So, Dangerbaby and I decided we'd try to do
a night time cafe "chill space", focusing
on the music of Sun Ra, with chai available Amateur bars
to drink. are common at
Burning Man,
coffee houses less
so.
There are a few
who do coffee/tea,
but typically only
in the morning.
To go with that, we also decided to
break out our old light show act,
using the old-fashioned tricks of "Mister Inbetween's light show
oil-water-dye blobs on an overhead apparatus: a revival of
projector. old-fashioned technologies:
the oil and water light show,
As is typical with me, with an electro-mechanical
I looked for a way to automate color wheel made from bicycle
part of the schtick, pressing parts and a fan motor."
into service some machinery
I've used for noise-making
purposes: a fan motor
driving bicycle wheels with
strips of inner-tube as belt
material. I had a bike wheel
already tricked out to use as
26 to 1 speed reduction,
and added some strips of
colored gels to another, which
I setup to spin by in front There were a number
of the overhead projector. of other tricks I had
in mind, but those
are the ones I got
working...
There were a number
of little hassles:
The gels were darker
than I thought, so I
re-designed to use
thin strips that would
interrupt the beam
only intermittently.
The belt drives worked
better with lighter
weight and more tension.
I had misalignment
problems with the bike
wheel belt-drives, until
I invented a gadget to
put an adjustable twist
to the frame.
The small fan I bought
at the last minute to
Something I found out the cool the motor had a
hard way: floor fans are broken base, and I
typically designed to use needed to improvise
the air-flow they generate a substitute.
to cool the motor. If you
remove the fan blades, you
remove the air-cooling, and
they overheat fairly
quickly. Duh.
So: I was driving the
apparatus with a floor
fan with a pulley wheel
in place of the fan blades;
and I needed to add yet Obviously, it would be
another fan to cool the better to have a pulley
motor. integrated with fan blades.
But even more obviously,
it would be better if I
got some better motors,
e.g. ones that can be
run at a slower speed
without using bicycle
parts to gear them down.
But then, everyone does
like looking at the spinning
bike-wheels: people love
*visible* mechanical
apparatus.
In any case, this "light show" business
turned out to be harder than I remembered
it... a lot of it was probably the setting: (In a theater setting,
there was so much light pollution from with eyes accoustomed
different sources (and our "screen" was to the dark, this
less than perfect: the white plastic side over head projector
of the dome), the old transparency projector was actually *too bright*...
just wasn't bright enough to let me get When I flipped it on
away with more than around two layers of we all winced, and I
filtering. wished I'd had a dimmer
for it.)
That immediately cramped my style
a lot... then on top of that, it Over a year
took a lot of work for me to get later I opened
the hang of manipulating oil/water (I suspect I was up this
blobs with the tools at hand. missing a simple projector to
trick -- e.g. clean it, and
(And as luck would have it, adding glycerine discovered the
for my first "performance" to the mess.) *real* problem:
I had an expert who was in the bulb was
the light show business -- *caked* with
though he didn't know anything plya dust,
directly about "doing oil" baked onto
to give me any hints...) it: ceramic
dust on it's
way to becoming
enamel.
Argh.
This project was enough to earn
me a reputation in our camp for
"competence". This says a lot
about our camp.
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