Here are a few shots from the actual installation of the balloons.
The reflections were almost my favourite part.
Up in Wagga Wagga for
the Illuminate Festival on the banks for the Murrumbidgee river, the actual
install for this was not quite as seamless as I’d hoped. I had imagined a nice slow moving body
of water with two buoys in place at either end and that it would be a simple
matter of taking them out one by one to pop them into place. Pootle out with
our boat full of balloons and causally clip them into place as we cruised down
the line. For a big river the Murrumbidgee flows surprisingly fast (faster than
I can swim anyway) and the site we were allocated “the Rocks” was a short
section of rapids so the motor boat we had borrow wasn’t as useful as we’d
hoped. Between the rapids, our marginal boating skills, and all the string and
electrical cable we were laying out in the river were the boat ended up being
more of a liability than anything else and, after tangling one of the lines in
the propellor and nearly losing a balloon, we ended we abandoned the power boat
and moved on to Plan B.
“Plan B” was Greg
paddling everything in with his inflatable canoe. Greg was just able to paddle
fast enough to make headway up-stream but the moment he would stop paddling to
try and tie a knot or clip on a balloon he would either be swept off downstream
or sometimes hilariously capsized.
“Plan C” we hadn’t
really considered up until that point but basically it involved swimming the
whole lot in instead, and given Greg’s recent efforts, it seemed only fair that
it was might turn now to tackle the icy torrent. With snow still sitting in the
hills at the rivers source, the water was properly Baltic, and given the speed it
was moving I had to walk a hundred or so meters up stream and then just swim
like hell out past the rapids with a rope between my teeth to try and reach the
line we’d installed down the middle of the river. Once there, you’d have to feel
your way down the line as the river dragged you along until you managed to find
one of the to the attachment points we’d preinstalled. At that point, with one
hand holding the central line to stop you being swept downstream, you had to
make between using your other hand to tie then knot or paddling to keep your
head above water. If you let go of
the line with your other hand you’d immediately just be swept downstream and
have to start all over again. After a few abandoned attempts, the best way
seemed to be to take a deep breath and then just let the river suck you under
while you tied your knot or attached your shackle (or whatever your task was on
that particular run). Once you’d done all that and caught your breath, you’d then
have to swim back through the rapids to the bank, defrost for a moment in the
sun (thankfully it was a sunny day) and then do it all again, and again… and
again. Rinse, tumble, defrost,
repeat. I was so glad by the end of the afternoon that we’d gone for just four
balloons rather than the eight we’d initially considered.
We didn’t even bother
connecting the waterwheel I’d made which I’d designed to generate a nice
graceful up-down sinusoidal motion in the balloons. After all the time Id spent
getting it to work it was obvious that it was all for nought as the rapids were
had their own movement pattern in mind for balloons that we couldn’t hope to
compete with. So we just set the water-wheel up on the bank and the nice
ploonky-plunk noises it made provided a pleasing soundtrack for the whole thing.
As the sun set on and
afternoon of icy hilarity everything was in place and the lighting test that
went pretty smoothly. A few hours noodling with the computer to get the light
sequence right was relatively painless. To control the lights, I just ended up
using Isadora sending DMX Out through an Enttec. The setup was based on the
setup I’d built earlier to control the lights in Balance, but tweaked to give
me live control over various aspects of the light sequence so that I could
fairly easily control the speed of the changing colours and send pulses of
colour down the line of balloons.
You really dont get much of a sense fo scale with these as theyre so far out in the river but each of them was roughly the size of a small car.
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