Phase One is complete.
The Cube has been created and it took four boxes of toothpicks with 250 toothpicks in each box. That's a thousand right? I used toothpicks because I felt that building a structure with completely natural resources would be...interesting(?). I mean if I wanted to build a brick wall out of pebbles? That would be a lot of pebbles and stones. An entire beach by my calculations.
It was put together using that Alene's glue (rule break) and while making this I thought of another rather interesting idea.
Like maybe once a week during a period of boredom or stress, I would just add another 250 toothpicks to the cube so that by the end of a year the cube would actually be kinda big...but I guess that's another ball of wax.
Just to remind the point of the toothpick cube. I thought it would be cool to think of a sculpture as something small because most of the time they are big. I think that doing so has a lot of meanings when combined with nature. Like for instance, we kind of think as cataclysms to be large and encompassing in nature (e.g. nuclear weapons) . But there is always the possibility that a cataclysm will be as small as a virus (e.g. H1N1). Or that if you think of the cube as some sort of man made feat of engineering, when you put in context of the size of the Earth the tallest skyscraper is still rather small which then kind of puts our hubris in check.
As for phase two dubbed: MESSAGE IN A TOOTHPICK
The cube will be painted and placed somewhere in Portland with a note. Hopefully someone will pick it up and read the note which will say something along the lines of: "This is a sculpture project built by someone. You can keep it, modify it, or even destroy it. All I am asking is that you let me know what the fate of the Thousand Toothpick Structure is." And then there would be an email address attached. If things go right, someone picks it up and then does something to it and sends a message and / or a picture thus providing some sort of closure.
Why?
Because I think that even though we are improving technologically, there are some "human" aspects which are slipping away. Things that are kind of important...but not readily felt. People don't write letters anymore which I think is something that is really...what's the word...like everyone has unique handwriting and you can't hide who you are when you write something down because it's right there in the style. But with text messaging and even this computer everything becomes...detached...or buried.
Anyway.
Best case scenario is that it ends up bouncing along...maybe it makes it overseas or something. The Better Best case scenario is that someone takes it home just because they think it's cool.
And if anyone in the class wants to actually look for it or just happens to be in the immediate area of it. I'm thinking of just making a simple picture riddle to it's location and if you figure it out and go to the spot then you can do whatever you want with it.
These are the early pictures of it in the field behind my apartment. It's the field where I had my "House" moment and decided to go this direction with the project. There will be more pictures when I plant it in the city.
Thanks.
AA
