Moon Buggy 1.1 - 2006 Kinetic Art Parade
Here are some photos from the kinetic art parade at the 2006 Columbia Festival of the Arts. Things went much more smoothly for me here than at the race. With the finished drivetrain, Moon Buggy actually worked! It went the length of the parade (a bit under a mile) without breaking down once, a big improvement over the race. Which is good, a breakdown here would have been really embarrassing...
My friend Roanne found a good spot on a pedestrian walkway above the parade and took the shots of the parade. The order of the parade was KinetiNautilus (winner of the Pilot's Choice and Spirit of the Founder awards in the 2006 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race), then the art car Blue Hawaiian, followed by a dance team, the Chick-Fil-A mascot, some more cars, some bagpipers, myself, and several others.
In the photo of Moon Buggy at the reviewing stand, check out the spiral design on the wheels! My roommate Andrea came up with it the previous evening, and we quickly spray painted the designs onto the wheels on between waves of rain. With those, it actually looks like art!
In the parade's literature we were invited to leave our sculptures on display for the rest of LakeFest. Moon Buggy ended up on a little grassy knoll, and it actually looked like an art installation meant to go there. If I can ever find a photo of it there I'll post it
I found it really remarkable while I was moving the sculpture around that whenever I stopped or even slowed down I got mobbed! People would surround me, some taking photos, some asking questions, some just looking. Lots of folks wanted to know how it steered, how it was propelled, whether it floated, where the idea came from, etc. One guy asked if I might be looking for a new job (No, I was already going to grad school that fall – but if I had been thinking I would have grabbed his business card anyway!). It was really cool, my own little 15 minutes in the sun. Perhaps the most gratifying was talking to a couple and their daughter, perhaps 12 years old. She (the daughter) thought it was really cool that Moon Buggy was a truly different mode of transportation, not just a structure sitting on some bicycles. Yes! That's exactly what I was trying for, I wanted to make something that actually moved in a different way, not just something that looked different. I was quite happy that it was noticed. She could be a future engineer, perhaps? (By the way, this is not meant as a dig at other sculptures that are based on bicycles. Some, like the KinetiNautilus are probably more mechanically sophisticated than Moon Buggy, and art-wise many of them blow my sculpture out of the water!)
All images on this page are copyright © 2006 by Roanne Louie. Used with permission.