Monday Week 7

So begins our second to last week! We're almost there.

Question(s) of the day:
-What is your favorite kind of meat?
-Knee Socks or Footies?

We finished both of the 10x10 houses, disassembled them, and brought everything over to the armory. Our team work is amazing, because we've almost got one of the houses up in the ceiling in only ONE day! We are flyin and stylin:

The important weekend

So during Saturday and Sunday, Michael and I worked on constructing the houses and the beams for over 20 hours! We did this at Rike so that we are able to make our mistakes in the air conditioning, disassemble everything, bring it over to the Armory, and then reassemble it on the floor and put it up in the ceiling. So Michael and I did a lot of bonding. :) We went shopping, ate burritos, drank a lot of coffee, listened to Nirvana (among many other bands), sawed things, drilled things, pounded things, lifted things, etc etc.
Here's a picture of Michael waiting for the hardware store lady to figure out how to process our tax exempt form:

Trimming some stuff. It's pretty:

Our first of two 10 x 10 houses up and hangin!

Our Group of the Week presentation was a success!

We got a lot of great feedback and comments from our GOTW presentation on Thursday!

We spent the whole day setting things up, and it went very smoothly :)

We set up one of the houses in the other room and put on our question videos, along with the sound recording of "psychedelic" as people walked in.

We also had projections of birds all along the walls:

The sound stops and our "home videos" start to play on the house. Then begins a reflection narrative (written by all of us, put together and performed by nate), and I was improvising with him live on my electric violin. We were behind the wall in the other room and we were amplified and microphoned so that we could be heard and not seen. Here's a pic before the presentation doing sound check:

After we were finished, each of us came out through the closet door on the side of the room and talked about the following topics: Experience, Video, Audio, Maps/Model, and Construction. 

After the Question and Answer session was over, we invited everyone to go around and check out the model of the armory that we have (finally) completed! Ta-da:

Group of the Week Presentation!!!

Shameless plug time!

Come to our Group of the Week presentation tomorrow, Thursday July 22 at 3:00 PM. 
Important note: Our location is different from previous groups' presentations!
We will be in Room 206, Rike Creative Arts Building on UD's campus.
The presentation will start promptly at 3:00 and will go for about a half an hour.
See you there!
~~~~~~~
Tuesday question of the day: Carnivore or Herbivore?
Wednesday question of the day: Are we as a group controlled or operating under free will?

We are now a 9-legged group...

Thursday Week 5
Due to the situation and certain circumstances, Tim left our group last Thursday. :(
It was a very teary farewell (for me anyway), but it was his decision. As we sat around after having just lost a member of our group, we talked about the feelings that were going through us. We were sad to see him go and frustrated at the situation. However, through our loss the 9 of us became closer than ever before. We have become stronger and we know that there is still a lot of work to do! We are intensely working each and every day.

Question of the day: What is your religion?

Monday and Tuesday Week 6

So begins CONSTRUCTION WEEK! Time to whip out the power tools. A face everyone should make when using a nail gun:

We have prepared the ceiling of the Armory for us to work in, and we have begun building our pieces. There are a lot of pieces we need.

We have one 5x5 ft. house completed, we need to build two other 10x10 ft. houses. That means.... 1000 square feet of wax paper for the walls and roofs. Nate and I wiped out Dollar General of their wax paper and then went to get more at Kroger. To make it easier on our backs and our sanity, we constructed a frame to make the walls:


In order to hang the houses in the ceiling, we are creating boxes for the conduit to run through.
We need a lot more than shown here:

And we've also been doing even more work on the model of the Armory:

Other than all that, we are preparing for our Group of the Week presentation on Thursday! Unlike all the others, we will be presenting in Rike in one of our studios because for whatever reason, the Theater everyone else has been using is being used for something else on Thursday. :( This frustrates us a lot, but we're going to make it work.

Yay Week 6 <3

~Kristen

Week 5 Tuesday/Wednesday - Maps

For the past two days we've been making abstract geographical representations from maps of where we live.  We started out with small print-outs of selections of our neighborhood from mapquest. Then we played around with bigger abstractions of those images. And after that, we made huge abstractions of the abstractions!

Click here to check out our projects: Maps

In the morning we all enjoyed the view from inside the house:

Open-House! Thursday July 8 + Monday Week 5

Blue Sky 2010's Open House was a success! It was great to see everybody's projects in progress.

We got a lot of work done on Thursday scrambling for open house. We finished the frame, walls, and roof for one of our half-scale (5x5 ft) houses. Then we hung it up in one of our studios and projected silent video up onto the walls while we had our compositions playing on loop in the background. I hope the crazy voices didn't scare anyone away. We threw it all together really quickly, but we got a lot of great feedback and comments for our project idea!

Thursday's question of the day: What is your favorite word?

We were unfortunately so busy on Thursday that I forgot to get pictures of our display... maybe we'll come across some later!

Today we went to Yellowsprings and visited Michael's studio! It was magical and held a lot of dangerous tools that could cut through cold steel in less than a second. We also moved around a whole bunch of wood to and from several places, and we ate lunch at Ha Ha's Pizza. It was delicious, thanks Michael! :)

Today's question of the day (Monday July 12): What is your zodiac sign?

The Age of Aquarius is almost upon us....

Your favorite Aquarian,
Kristen <3

Wednesday Week 4

Today we got a LOT of stuff done!
In the morning we shot the question videos:

Question of the Day: How many kids?

Then we spent the rest of the morning watching Victoria's videos of her neighborhood and house, and a couple interviews with her dad.

After lunch, we all worked on a lot of stuff in teams. We got so much done this way!

Building the Armory model
Andrew, Lesley, and Meriel worked on building the wooden boards for the ceiling of our small scale model of the Armory.
 

Building the model of the first house (half-scale 5 x 5 ft)
We left it to Ashia to start the small-scale model of the first house, which we started building today.

Making the projection screens

Kristen and Victoria started making the walls of the house, which will be projection screens made out of sheets of wax paper 61.5 x 43 inches. Since we had to iron together sheets of wax paper, it was difficult to keep our measurements exact. It took a few tries to get it exactly right...

Making the frame of the house

Michael, Nate, Alex, and Tim started making the frame of the house using electrical conduit. They had to bend it and measure it and connect it all together. We survived today with only one injury (Tim accidentally cut himself).

Tuesday Week 4

Today's Question of the day was: Is life more about the destination or the ride?

The Ride had a overwhelming lead over Destination with only one vote. I'll leave it up to the viewers to guess who that one vote was. If any of our viewers can guess right we will give them a prize fit for kings... let the game begin. Next we watched the amazing life of Nate through his video depiction of his world in which he his king. We talked about some important point and feelings towards our final project and after lunch we finished and shared our soundscapes then started production on our first prototypes of our memory boxes.
~Nate

Check out some (a very small bit) of our audio equipment:

  

And the material we will be using for our projections: a bunch of wax paper ironed together. Here's what it looks like with a black and white video of a pen drawing ink (Ann Hamilton) projected onto it with the lights off and on:

Monday Week 4

Nathaniel S. Crum here updating for our plethora of viewers on what UPACIPIABSDO has been up to the past two days.

Monday our Question of the day was: Sony or Nintendo? The answers were fairly even.

Afterwards we watched Kristen's account of the many places she lives and what made her, her. We broke for lunch early since the campus was closed so we had to go off campus to eat. After lunch we broke off into our groups to work on our soundscapes. Here are the finished products, which took about 3 days to complete.

Michael, Nate, Meriel, Victoria, and Ashia: Medical Office

Kristen, Tim, Alex, Lesley, and Andrew: Psychedelic

~Nate

P.S. Kristen says Happy Summer Days :)

Thursday Week 3

On Wednesday and Thursday we started setting up all the audio equipment: mixers, midi keyboard, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, electric violin, a few different microphones (shotgun mic, SHURE-58, two USB mics), drum sticks, mbox, cymbals, and a humongous bunch of cables for various things...
We set up the really old surveillance cameras. As it turns out, they are extremely sensitive to light... they must have been used for night time surveillance. Those will be great for the ceiling, where we're going to be installing all of the houses. We split into two groups and started making recordings of soundscapes, one of a waiting room and one under the elusive and broad genre of psychedelic. We'll post those when we're done! Recording is a long and picky process...

So since we have to collect a lot of video and audio materials, we are starting a daily activity where we film our one-word responses to various questions...

Thursday Question of the Day: Elvis or The Beatles?