Planetary Surfaces and the Insides of Disco Balls

What I did this week:

-Experimented with several methods for attaching mirrored poly-acrylic to itself.

-made a rough scale model of the interior of the viewfinder.

-Discovered 100 ways NOT to make a revere disco ball.

-Applied a stop motion animation idea to kinetic sculpture.

For the past few weeks I've been zeroing in on different facets of my installation to try and stumble on the most aesthetically pleasing and cost effective making techniques. This week, I focuses on the physical surfaces on which I would be projecting.

These models were really useful to have made, becuase they turned out really, really bad. But I went ahead and kept building anyway becuase I still had something to learn from them.

I began by bending and re-attaching thin sheets of poly-acrylic into a folded origami shape, and accidentally broke almost every one.

Lesson 1: poly acrylic is brittle when scored.

So I tried to re-attach the pieces with rubber cement, which looked terrible. So naturally I tried to make a soldering gun out of a hair dryer. Maybe if I could melt the plastic together, it would adhere cleanly.

Lesson 2: Hair dryers make terrible soldering guns.

So I finally broke down and bought a hot glue gun. It worked to attach the broken pieces, but with the visibility of hot glue chunks, so disappears the magic from any artwork not about the irony of using hot glue in art.

I sprayed my frankenstein creation with mirror spray, then with white spray paint to make the mirror non-transparent. After that, I epoxied transparency paper to the white paint and discovered that by shining a light behind the surface, I could selectively reveal images.

I have a bit more exploring to do with these surfaces, and much more finagling until they look clean enough to be made into a real installation, but rest assured I'll be hot glued to my seat until I figure it out.