Photo credit: Caitlind r.c. Brown

And there you have it! The second edition of CLOUD has been installed successfully at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow. The above image, and most of the below images, are from the Opening Night of Art Experiment on January 2, 2013. Wayne and I took most of these photos, so feel free to re-post them with a photo credit, if you like.

Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett underneath the second edition of CLOUD at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow. Art Experiment 2013.

After three weeks of welding, bulbing, glueing, and managing worker bees, CLOUD is finally up in Moscow! Wayne and I are pleased as punch. It’s been five days since Art Experiment opened, and so far the show has been sold out and there haven’t been any (significant) complications. We’re learning slowly to budget for the occasional chain breakage and problematic sockets, but despite being miniature powers of destruction, Russian kids are immensely excited about CLOUD.

CLOUD at Garage offers a quality that the original piece at Nuit Blanche in Calgary didn’t offer: because the piece is up for 3-weeks instead of 6-hours, audiences are able to have a very unique, individual relationship with the sculpture. It’s interesting to watch one person at a time stand underneath CLOUD, turning on and off light bulbs.

Of course, there are pros and cons. Because CLOUD is the Centerpiece of Art Experiment, it’s located in the central space between all the other exhibits in the show. Everyone needs to pass through the CLOUD Room to enter any of the other spaces (seen above with keys on each door), and so audiences are able to spend some quality time with the piece. While it’s fascinating for people to be able to participate with the work and have time to observe its various aesthetic qualities, certain people (COUGH little kids COUGH) have time to mutate from awed art-viewers, into happy-go-lucky playground terrors, hanging from pull-chains like monkeys at the zoo. This is objectively adorable, but children are unexpectedly strong, and the Garage staff has a small mountain of maintenance ahead of them after each and every show. I exaggerate, however there’s something to be said for one-time-only viewership in the middle of a well-behaved crowd. Nonetheless, broken pull-chains would indicate that CLOUD in Russia is a hit – especially for ages 2 – 9!!

Still, next time Wayne and I are at Garage, we’re going to poke some grown-ups into unadulterated play.

Art Experiment 2013 has opened at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture here in Moscow, and by all appearances it is a tremendous success! The next week is SOLD OUT, and kids are already wreaking happy havoc on CLOUD (holy cow, I underestimated the destructive powers of children. A couple hundred Russian toddlers are a far greater damaging force than 10,000 drunk Calgarians!) But before we get into the meat of CLOUD in Moscow, I’d like to introduce you briefly to the other artists featured in Art Experiment 2013.

The first artist to arrive in Moscow (after Wayne and I) was Danielle Tay. Danielle is originally from Singapore, but based in London, UK. A student at Slade School of Fine Arts, Danielle’s piece in Art Experiment was called Pods and played with microscopic/macroscopic worlds, each based around a theme (ice, sand, underwater, etc). Audiences were invited to interact with the pods by entering the spaces and touching them. Depending on the pod, they could either play in the sand, run their hands over crazy green noodles, listen to a sound piece, or inspect some cool collages. Art Experiment audiences were then invited to build their own pods in the workshop room next door. Pretty awesome!

Jason Hackenwerth was the second artist to arrive at Art Experiment in Moscow. Jason built some large-scale inflatable tunnels for the show, and created one of his staple balloon sculptures. Jason’s previous work has appeared in some amazing spaces – as seen in the image below, he’s shown inside the theatre at the Guggenheim!

Jason’s also created a series of fantastic performative photographs. In the one below, he hiked out onto a lava flow to create an image. Apparently the lava rock was sharp as glass, and just as they prepared to take this image, it began to snow. Jason was screaming at the universe when the image was created.

For Art Experiment, Jason was working with billowing plastic to create Aquarius, a piece which he tried to infuse with spiritual properties. It’s hard to tell from photographs, but these giant domes were inflated using just two fans. They fluttered ever so slightly in the wind, like being inside a gigantic floating jelly fish.

Karina Smigla-Bobinski was the third artist to arrive at Garage. Originally from Poland, Karina is now based in Munich, where she teaches and creates art. Karina has worked in a variety of mediums (I recommend viewing her website for a more comprehensive view of her work). The image below is a photo of a temporary installation created by Karina for a park in Munich. Entitled Islands, the piece used very simple technologies to create the illusion of Rubble Women floating beneath the surface of the water in this historically complex public space. Apparently, movement in the surface of the water made the women look as though they were breathing.

For Art Experiment at Garage, Karina showed ADA, a large helium-filled ball covered in charcoal nubs. The piece floats gently in the space until interacted with by viewers, who can toss the ball against the walls, creating scratchy drawings on the surfaces of the gallery space. During the course of the exhibition, the walls and ball evolve into a dense collection of scribbles. At that point, anyone interacting with ADA gets completely covered in charcoal! Karina has shown ADA all over the world already, and it was interesting to hear about some of the interactions that the piece inspires in viewers.

The fourth and fifth artists to arrive were Hsiao-Chi Tsai & Kimiya Yoshikawa. Working frequently as a collaborative team, Hsiao-Chi and Kimiya were curated into Art Experiment fairly late in the process of organizing the exhibition. Because of this timing, they were given very specific stipulations by Garage. For example, their previous work (as seen below) is incredibly colourful. For Art Experiment, they were asked to create an all-white work coloured via projections. Likely, this was intended to compliment the workshop already scheduled for the space, where viewers are invited to create marbled tote bags.

Because of the perimeters for their work at Garage, Hsiao-Chi and Kimiya were genuinely experimenting with white materials for the first time at Art Experiment. The resulting piece is a kaleidoscopic wall sculpture. I’m looking forward to spending more time observing this piece in between workshops when the space can be completely dark!

On a side note, it was really interesting talking to another collaborative team about their process as a duo.

The last two artists to show up at Garage were Sam Bompas and Harry Parr. Known as “Jelly Mongers,” Sam and Harry are, simply put, real characters. Most of their work heavily involves food, multi-sensory stimuli, consumption (literally), and a healthy dose of persona-infused hilarity. They’ve created everything from a gherkin chandelier to a swimming pool full of jelly! These dudes are real party pleasers. The below images are from their book, (which is available on Amazon) called “Feasting with Bompas & Parr.“

Sam and Harry’s piece for Art Experiment was inspired by Antony Gormley’s Art World sensation Blind Light, which is essentially a large, plexiglas-walled room filled with intense mist. Viewers of Blind Mist were invited to walk through the mist without the ability to see more than a foot or so in front of them.

Antony Gormley’s piece Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery in London

Sam told me that he and Harry went to see the piece in London, and it was cool and all, but there was something missing. The boys decided that the missing ingredient was flavour, and so, for Art Experiment at Garage, they created a simulation of the very same piece, except instead of boring old mist, they filled the space with flavoured mist. Now, depending on the day, you can walk in and taste strawberries, lemons, mint, of a variety of other mystery flavours. How crass!

For Wayne and I, it’s been a fascinating adventure to be involved with such an interesting array of artists. New Years was something else! But those stories, I think, should only be relayed in person…

New Years with the Artists behind Art Experiment at Garage! I have absolutely no idea who to photo credit for this image, but I do remember that it’s Kimiya sliding through the foreground of the picture…

Yesterday, Wayne and I were featured on Moscow Television. Via an interpreter, a Moscow reporter asked us questions, and we answered in English, which was then re-interpreted back into Russian for the cameras. The experience was not unlike any North American interview (blonde and well-kempt reporter, vivacious cameraman, semi-contrived directives), except, midway through a televised demonstration of how the sculpture works, there was an unexpected short in one of the sockets causing electricity to zap down through a pull-chain, turning it red hot and burning it off in a poof of acrid-smelling smoke. We didn’t even notice until we smelled burning. What unfortunate timing!

Needless to say, Garage’s Public Relations rep sprung tactfully into action, and the incident was casually swept under the rug. The moment news crews left, the electrician appeared and started tinkering again. But the implications, especially in a country running on 220v, were a teeny bit scary! Boy am I glad we tested the CLOUD before January 2^nd!

Don’t worry – this isn’t as dramatic as it sounds. Hiccups are expected. There were major electrical kinks with the first CLOUD (we couldn’t get the thing working until two hours before Nuit Blanche when some beneficent electrical fairy descended from the City of Calgary to lend a helping hand!) but it would be a hell of an embarrassment if we managed to electrocute ourselves on Russian TV!! After some discussions, dissections, and an electrician carefully testing each and every light bulb socket this morning, we established that we literally had our wires crossed (language barrier + exterior helpers), and Wayne’s confident that it won’t happen again.

Still… there’s something dangerously delightful about the idea that the second edition of CLOUD is an actual honest-to-goodness electrical cloud – it’s emitting its own lightning bolts!

There are only a few more aesthetic details to take care of before the show opens. Of course, I’m a little disappointed that admission to the show is 1,000 rubles (the equivalent of $30 CAN) because we can’t just ask our local art-friends to attend, and I’m also concerned that a higher-end clientele won’t be stoked enough to have fun. This system of pricing is probably all very complicated, but 1,000 pyr. seems like a gargantuan cost! Still, Art Experiment is going to be an amazing show, so hopefully it will be worth every penny.

The other artists have started showing up, and they’re all really great, talented, interesting, and entertaining folks. The first was Danielle from the London. She’s still a student, but she’s building (with the help of a factory design team) a series of interactive multi-sensory domes. Audiences are invited to crawl through these globes (filled with sand, foam, lights, fabric, paper, etc) and view new miniature worlds together.

Jason from New York is presently air-sculpting large-scale inflatable tunnels and a balloon sculpture. He shapes the tunnels out of billowing painter’s plastic, which buoys into the air with the help of several fans. The simple movement and sound to this piece is stunning.

Today we also had the pleasure of meeting Art Experiment’s newest arrival, Karina from Munich. Karina has constructed a giant, helium-inflated ball that has dozens of charcoal nubs attached on all sides, like a gentle bomb. The ball is places in a white room, floating in mid-air, and audiences are invited to bump it around, drawing on all the surfaces of the space.

This is all very cool stuff, and we’re super excited to be part of this crew! It’ll just get more interesting as the remainder of the artists appear. Considering that this is our first international showing, I think it’s an extra special delight to be meeting such an interesting medley of folks from all over the world, each bringing their own understandings of interactivity and contemporary art-making. No doubt we have much to learn and share. And who knows? Perhaps this will change our views of the entire (art) world. Or maybe it will simply be a valuable re-affirmation that this whole wacky planet offers some striking similarities. All we know is that we have one day left to finish CLOUD, and (for now) we’ve got to keep our feet firmly planted and get back to work… just for a little while longer. Cross your fingers for no more electrical storms!

Boy, were we sheepish when we miscalculated the amount of light bulbs needed to finish the second edition of CLOUD by 1,300 bulbs.  As a number, did we just pull 5,000 light bulbs out of the air? CLOUD #2 is smaller than CLOUD #1 by several feet in all directions. There are only two potentials: either Philips light bulbs are smaller in Russia than Canada, or we dramatically underestimated the amount of burnt out bulbs donated in Calgary… by at least a thousand bulbs, if not not more. The second edition of CLOUD will be created from 6,300 light bulbs, which means that the original CLOUD must have been constructed from over 7,000 light bulbs!!! Pretty cool, no?

As we draw closer and closer to December 31^st (our theoretical deadline for this project) Wayne and I are getting more and more confident that everything is going to be just fine. We’re ahead of schedule (thanks in part to Garage’s Worker Bees) and the piece looks pretty okay. There are always one or two little nit-picky things that I can ruminate on for hours (much to Wayne’s chagrin), but are stringy hot-glue trails really such a big deal…?

By the by, in case I haven’t told you folks already, while Art Experiment at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture is a group show, CLOUD is the centerpiece of the exhibition and the bulbous poster child for Garage’s marketing campaign. Gotta say, it’s pretty crazy to watch images of our ARRRT going up on posters and glowing billboards all around Gorky Park. (Oh man, Doug Wong, in case you’re reading this, thank you so much for taking such an amazing photograph of CLOUD at Nuit Blanche in Calgary.  We owe you big!)

Well team, time to get crackin’! On Boxing Day, Garage sent us a legion of their finest, and in one fell swoop, they bulbed the remainder of the beast! (At least the top of her), and hoisted her into the air like 1,000-pounds of nothing. I must say, strong men are an asset – I much prefer this method to sketchily using a small Scissor Lift. The installation at Garage versus the installation at Nuit Blanche couldn’t be more different! Both spaces have their charms (I miss the amphitheater-aesthetic of Olympic Plaza terribly!) but it’s magical to finally get CLOUD air-born. Between Calgary and Moscow, it’s been a fascinating and educational ride – we’re learning new things every day!

For example, if you even imply that you need help in a space like this, they’ll send you a giant team of hyper-speedy work-men who will do your bidding like a frantic swarm of worker bees. This was super overwhelming at first (even just managing the aesthetic of the piece was pretty challenging – GLUE STRINGS EVERYWHERE) but I think we finally have the hang of managing the incredible force that Garage’s work-team contributes. Being organized and proactive is basically the only way to deal with fast workers. And knowing when to ask for fewer cooks in the cloud-kitchen (hi-yuck!)

Christmas at Garage was a little bit bleak and sad – Wayne and I were both missing our families, and Russians don’t celebrate Christmas on December 25th. Instead, Orthodox Russian Christmas is celebrated on December 7th, and Canadian Christmas is treated like any other work day. Which would have been okay, I think, if we weren’t both missing our families in other places, stuffing themselves with turkey, exchanging gifts, spending time together, and generally doing what families do on a major family-based holiday. You know - family stuff.

New places are always lonely, but I think Russia in the winter can be particularly so. Russian winters have won and lost wars, instigated incredible literature, and driven people mad. Though Wayne and I are still as sane as any other artist(s), the language barrier and cultural differences here are, in the immediate present, driving me batty.

There are things about being here that I love, but it’s been hard on my sensitive soul that public customs between strangers are seldom friendly (especially in the winter, I suspect). Often it seems like smiles are not returned almost anywhere – on the streets, in the metro, even with people we see everyday (security guards at the hotel, etc). To me, while subtle, this is a giant cultural difference, and it can be a disconcerting and discouraging one. Certainly there are customs and kindnesses of a different sort, but open enthusiasm is a rareity, and there are times where I just can’t stand it.

On the flip side, perhaps there’s a certain type of sincerity in this behavior. Clearly I feel the need to reflect about public interactions in general – nature vs. nurture, how social climates change and evolve, the biases of my own limited understanding, etc. But I can’t help but wonder how this will effect CLOUD. Remember all those smiling faces looking up at the first edition during Nuit Blanche Calgary? I think that the second edition, while an altered replica of the first, will be an experiment not just with interaction, but cross-cultural languages.

And perhaps that was the crux of my Christmas dissatisfaction. Here we are in Moscow, missing out on Canadian Christmas (and my Mom’s amazing cinnamon buns) working really hard to create a giant, interactive sculpture that might not even overcome cultural barriers. We’re stuck asking ourselves this: Can the second edition of CLOUD transcend even our own bad attempts at Russian, and touch Muscovite audiences in a deeper, more delightful way? Can it ask local viewers to think about art/energy/objects/play and even each other in a new light? Or will the second edition of CLOUD be, as one teacher at ACAD put it, “merely beautiful”?

Just so you don’t feel too sorry for us, internet-land, I should reassure you that Christmas in Moscow was by no means a total loss, but rather, it was another seminal step in this CLOUD-Land Adventure. I think it was probably high time for a minor crisis of meaning, and everything from here on up will be smooth sailing. At the end of the night, Wayne and I ended up in our favourite Georgian restaurant, eating a scrumptious meal and drinking giant beers with with our new friend Shriya. When we wandered back out into the world beyond, it was snowing like crazy. That’s the power of Russian Winter – it might make you crazy, but it’s beautiful and complex and totally fascinating. But then, that’s not unlike Russia Herself…

Shriya and Wayne doing a snow dance on Christmas day!

Christmas Eve for us was comprised of endless light bulbs, a little bit of welding, and watching the last of the confetti settle. There was a private party at Garage last night – which must have been spectacular, because the cleaning staff spent 8-hours solid attempting to vacuum up bits of confetti (especially out of the grooves between floor boards…)

Everything happens so quickly here! Yesterday there was a miniature paper city in the gallery space, and a giant room filled from floor to ceiling with blue balloons, and then this morning, there as only broken glass, trash, and three giant garbage bags filled with popped rubber. At present, there’s a 16-foot long CLOUD covered in light bulbs, about a million cardboard boxes scattered all over the floor, and new walls springing up in all directions. Welcome to the world of contemporary art galleries, where time moves at an accelerated rate towards an impending deadline: The Opening.

Champion CLOUD volunteer Yuriy, posing like a tough guy after cutting open his finger and bleeding all over the place!

Yuriy marked some bulbs with his finger-blood. They may be new, but they now have a history. Take that, Philips!

Despite speculation about the possibility of finding volunteers in Russia, Garage managed to collect a fantastic team of champion bulbers for Wayne and I to work with over the past few days. Yuriy, Alexandr, Anastasia, and Shriya all came by to help us, and spent hours gluing and screwing bulbs into wire mesh. They were so fast, I think we managed to attach 1,000 bulbs on Saturday alone! Only 4,000 to go – and we’ve only broken two bulbs thus far!

Of course, our poor new friend Yuriy managed to slice open his finger half an hour into volunteering (pretty badly too. I learned very quickly that the Russian words for “First Aid Kit” are the same as in English) but he was very brave, and he kept right at it, even after his finger was doused with antiseptic and wrapped in bandages. Seriously, volunteers in Russia, while uncommon, are made of gold!

If any of our former Calgary friends/volunteers are keeping up with this blog, we can’t thank you enough for your help with the original CLOUD – what would we do without awesome people who are willing to hang out with the likes of us and perform repetitive, annoying, mildly dangerous tasks for hours on end? We’d certainly drive ourselves crazy without you. And to our new volunteers (some of whom have never ever volunteered before in their lives!) thank you for donating your time to this big, shiny beast of a thing! Between all of us and our blood, sweat, and tears, the second edition of CLOUD is coming together brilliantly.

Welcome back to the tornado! We’ve spent the last few days working on wiring the beast. It’s been tedious work, (especially without our Calgary pals to help out!) but it’s gotta get done. Here’s Wayne holding some of the 200 sockets we need to wire in the next few days. The above is about 2-hours worth of work.

However, the good news is this: our light bulbs have arrived! Boxes and boxes of incandescent light bulbs. Our Garage correspondent, Alexey, was so excited he did a little dance!

In other news, The Calgary Herald recently published this article about us. It’s nice to have support from home! (Hey, we’re just glad people know that we’re gone!)

For fear of boring you with the repetition, I haven’t posted many photos in the last few days. The thing is that CLOUD, for the time being, still just looks like a giant lump of steel. I mean, we’re twisting it and shaping it, but metal is metal. A person can only look at so many photos of a dude welding, right?

The last few days have been filled with the standard, mid-project doldrums. We’re in the calm before the bulbing storm, preparing ourselves mentally and physically, and prepping the sculpture for the rapid application of 400-pounds worth of light bulbs.

Our timeline looks like this: light bulbs arrive tomorrow (December 21^st, which also corresponds with the end of the world). We whip as many bulbs onto the piece as possible for the proceeding few days. The CLOUD is suspended from the ceiling of the gallery space on Christmas day, and then Wayne and I, and a team of yet-to-be-announced volunteers will spend until the first day of the new year hot gluing the heck out of the second edition of CLOUD. The Opening Reception for Art Experiment is on January 2, 2013.

If the world actually ends tomorrow, does that mean we won’t have to finish this damn thing? Or does it just mean that we’ll have a life-time supply of light bulbs in our bomb shelter?

Speaking of the end of the world, at least we managed to squeeze in a New Years Party before everything explodes. Last night, Wayne and I had the great pleasure of attending Garage’s annual employee New Years celebration. Because of Soviet roots in Russia, Christmas isn’t really a big deal. Instead, New Years is the biggest event of the year, and there are many New Years celebrations leading up to the actual change in the calendar year. Taking pity on the poor visiting artists from Canada, Garage invited us to their party, and boy oh boy, was it ever a blast! Thematically, it was a wear-what-you’re-usually-too-scared/shy-to-wear party and there was everything from dudes in heals (and managing very well, thank you) to gals in wedding dresses, folks face-painted like cats, bubble-wrap jackets, I Heart My Bed pajamas, Star Wars/Ukrainian finery (don’t ask), and a whole band dressed up in these weird, totally undescribable, plastic+sequined genderless future outfits. There was free gourmet cuisine and fancy booze – even flaming vodka! It was awesome. I think I speak for both of us when I say that I’ve never wished that we could speak Russian more than last night. Kudos to Garage for throwing the best staff party of all time.

Our workspace at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow

Rain-cloud street art by Kirra, a member of Partizaning Collective

Sometimes, on bleak and dreary days, something simple like meeting a collective of Russian Artists/Activists, can make a foreign land seem much more friendly. On Sunday, Wayne was feeling so sick we forfeit a day of CLOUD Factory labours in favour of napping. Midday, however, we were invited to meet up with some friends of the Arbour Lake Sghool Collective (our pals in Calgary) Shriya and MAKE, artists belonging to the Muscovite art collective Partizaning.  The group, which works with “participatory urban re-planning” is a team of street artists and activists, playing with the fabric of what makes Moscow Moscow. They observe urban spaces and neighbourhoods, posing questions and collecting thoughts. Shriya invited us to their present exhibition in a basement gallery space called Vodtochnaya Gallery. The show is Partizaning’s first real attempt at a formalized compilation of their work, and it was an amazing way of learning about the collective. The Partizaning website is another great way. Wayne and I had the pleasure of meeting almost the entire collective and sitting through an Artist Lecture – entirely in Russian! (Although MAKE did his best to translate as the talk progressed…)

The above image of a rain-cloud is by a member of Partizaning. We found it on a wall while wandering around the city with Shriya, in search of Georgian food.

Cloud Factory, Moscow

What a strange and magical place Garage is. The gallery, which used to be housed in an old Bus Garage in the outer circle of Moscow, recently moved inwards, to a paper pavilion in Gorky Park (which I’ve already told you about). This pavilion is brand-spankin-new, and still being finished around us as we work. The space is lovely, but what I find more interesting, as a Calgarian (ah, Calgary, the city that demolishes anything older than 25 years!) is the innovative re-use of Soviet-era buildings throughout Garage’s Kingdom. The offices of Garage, across the park, are in an old Factory, tastefully updated so that, while the exterior is aging and dilapidated, the interior looks like a suave design firm. The history of the building is still acknowledged visibly, but incorporated into the contemporary function of the space. (I’ll try to take some photographs and update this posting).

The workshop for Garage, the home of their power tools and practical gizmos, is in an old brick building. While everything is scattered in disarray, I get the distinct impression that the keepers of the space have their own universal order: they know where everything is, as if by jedi magic. Wayne and I went exploring (respectfully) while looking for some new wheels for the grinder. As a non-Hockey Fan (a fan of non-hockey) I had forgotten about the complex hockey history between Canada and Russia. Wayne, however, takes incredible delight in hockey culture. He was delighted when we found an old table-hockey game in the back of the shop, and a hockey stick attached to the wall of the building.

ps. a note to everyone back home, Wayne is feeling much better (thanks for all the intercontinental love!) and we’re back on schedule. Now we just need to wait for the incandescent light bulbs to arrive!

Good Morning Moscow. (a.k.a. Oh yeah, we’re in Russia!)

Wayne Garrett welding the second edition of CLOUD at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture

I’ve said it a dozen times already, but here we go again!

The (edited) plans for the second edition of CLOUD, scribbled on plans for the original sculpture

CLOUD (the second) is a slightly smaller version of the original piece. We have the benefit of having done the piece once already, and hopefully that experience will streamline the process. While we’re presently on schedule, we don’t have much space for error or sick-days, and as I type this (in the very busy lobby of the Holiday Inn we’re using as our headquarters) Wayne is sick upstairs. He insists that he has a head cold, prompted by jet-lag and the cold Russian climate. I’m convinced that breathing in welding fumes and grinder dust in our adapted workspace isn’t helping. But c’est la vie, I suppose. It’s all part of the show, folks, it’s all part of the show.

As a side note, check out the awesome welder helmets we’re using. Leopard Power! (Wayne’s obsessed with cats. This boded well.)

On the bright side, seeing more of the city was a grand adventure (even if I slept most of the way). Where else do winter markets as strange and magnificent as this exist? (We ended up at the below pictured winter market looking for chicken wire, which we never did find (in it’s North American form) although we found a wire similar enough to be functional).

Something we’ve discovered in gathering materials for the second edition of CLOUD is that many of our requested materials (which, for the most part, are standard items found at any Home Depot in Canada) are very difficult to locate in Moscow. Alexey has gone to the ends of the earth to find pull-chain sockets (apparently they’re a North American thing commonly cited by Russians as being “inspired by an American film [they] saw once!”) Also, things as simple as marrettes (again, a dime a dozen in Canada) have been unexpectedly difficult to find here. Ditto for most of our electronics! Here’s hoping that appropriate light bulbs can be found more easily!

We arrived in Moscow on a cold Tuesday morning. The traffic in this city is insane, which is perhaps expected from a city of 11-million people, although traveling two hours by taxi from Domodedovo International Airport at 5 am was more congestion than we expected. Arriving at our hotel, we were relieved to discover that we had a reservation (even at 7 am), and collapsed into bed gratefully after many a sleepless hour on the airplane, confident that our Muscovite benefactors were indeed expecting us.

It’s an adjustment being in a country where a majority of the population doesn’t speak one’s native tongue. Luckily, our hosts at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture have been nothing short of fabulous. Our first afternoon in Moscow, we were picked up by car and and transported to Gorky Park, the present site of Garage’s Temporary Pavillion, a building constructed in part from giant cardboard tubes and designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Dubbed “Garage” after the former Bus Garage the gallery occupied up until last year, the organization is awaiting a more permanent home in Gorky Park in 2013. In the meantime, the pavillion is an impressive transitional building.

The space the second edition of CLOUD will be installed is certainly different than the first space it occupied at Nuit Blanche Calgary. For that matter, the second edition of CLOUD is destined to be fairly different from the first version of the sculpture we built, but I’ll come back to that later. CLOUD ii will be installed indoors, with wooden flooring, and white walls. It will also be part of Art Experiment 2013, an annual group show featuring around six immersive installations by different artists from around the world, none of whom have been announced publicly yet. It’s all a giant secret, aimed at surprising and delighting Moscow art-lovers into loving art more, and non-art-lovers into thinking about art differently (ie. as a more fun thing). We’ve always considered CLOUD an experiment in community participation, so this context should be just splendid for the piece.

Wistfully, however, I am missing Calgary a little bit. And not just because we’re missing Christmas (which isn’t a big deal in the former Soviet Union) to build CLOUD ii, but because in Calgary we’re part of a particularly inter-supportive community. During the course of building the first edition of CLOUD at ACAD, we had so many pals who “just stopped by” to help out for hours at a time. With 2 3/4 weeks to go until the sculpture’s completion, not only are we missing the resources these folks offered, but we’re missing the entertainment of having pals like Brendan Kane, Clare Duckett, Svea Ferguson, Andrew Cook, Keith Rodger, Eric Heitmann, etc. etc. etc.!! to keep our spirits up. Nonetheless, we’ll make some new pals while we’re here (even if we can’t communicate perfectly) and it’ll become a different kind of experiment. As always, a request to those folks visiting this blog from out there in internet-land: wish us luck!

On the way here, we spent two all-nighters on airplanes, entertaining ourselves with new-age Disney movies and watching the clouds passing by (lazily) below. Jet lag is a funny phenomenon – it seems to reinforce the un-reality of things.  Here we are, two Canadian artists, really just at the entry point of our careers, invited to Russia to build a giant sculpture, funded completely by the gallery. Incapable of sleep on the way here, I spent almost an hour considering this: is it by sheer luck that we’ve found ourselves in this position? Were we just building the right sculpture at the right time? Or is The End of the World (mere days away) just baiting us with potential before the entire planet is overtaken by zombies and consequently explodes into a firey inferno of  action-movie-inspired hero montages.

One thing’s certain, though. We’re lucky. Lucky because CLOUD wasn’t just us – it was a thrilling community of Calgary-based artists and volunteers. It was funded locally through some of the best Arts groups in Calgary: Alberta College of Art + Design, The Nuit Blanche Foundation, The City of Calgary, Calgary Arts Development Authority, Calgary Public Arts, Calgary 2012, and The Awesome Foundation (Calgary chapter). It was supported whole-heartedly by our community, our families, our pals, and now that we’re away from Calgary and all of our Calgary-based support systems, we have a responsibility to do that community proud.

So here’s to you, Calgary, and the awesome projects that you make happen!  For Wayne and me, the next few weeks are going to be difficult – hard work, scrambling to find materials with are not so standard outside of North America, and building a giant sculpture in 3 weeks – but this is the most exciting adventure and amazing opportunity ever. Thanks again to our amazing team that made CLOUD #1 a possibility.  And Hello Russia!

Well folks, here we go again! Wayne Garrett and I have been invited to Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow to build a second edition of CLOUD. The sculpture will be the feature piece in Garage’s annual group show,  Art Experiment, beginning on January 2, 2013.

“January 2nd?” you say. “Wait… you mean, in just over a month?” you ask.

Yes, in just over a month we will have built a second CLOUD overseas. God help us.

ps. If you happen to live in Russia, and you have any spare burnt out incandescent light bulbs that you’d like to donate, you know where to go…

Personally, though, my biggest thanks goes to my collaborator Wayne Garrett for being endlessly patient and allowing CLOUD to evolve into a true collaboration, where we were both about as invested in the piece as any two happy-go-lucky crazy kids ever could be. For a complete list of Thank Yous, please look here.

CLOUD after the crowds faded at 3:20 am on Nuit Blanche night

The night of Nuit Blanche was incredible. The festival staff had estimated an attendance of 1,000-3,000 people for the first year of the festival, give or take. But when 7 pm finally rolled around, it became immediately evident that their estimation was off by a large sum. 10,000 people showed up, full of pep and vinegar and with the intention to interact-the-hell out of anything interactive.

Photo credit: Doug Wong

CLOUD saw monstrous public traffic solidly between 7 pm and 3 am. We hadn’t expected that amount of enthusiasm or longevity to the interaction. Somehow, we also didn’t foresee the look of awe on people’s faces as they stood beneath CLOUD, trying to figure out how it works. It was surprising how mysterious the functionality of the CLOUD became – it uses only the simplest mechanisms (ON, OFF, PULL) and the most familiar domestic objects (everyday light-bulbs and pull strings). These are thing we all know and understand. And yet, something about it’s form and brilliance struck viewers on a more internal level, allowing them to loiter happily, mesmerized by the glow of the bulbs above them.

Photo credit: Doug Wong

I heard a story later from a woman who has three disabled children. She was at Nuit Blanche Calgary with her kids. She said that her kids usually have huge anxiety around strangers, and it’s really difficult to get them to interact with things, but for some reason CLOUD was different. Her 13-year old son ran straight for CLOUD and began pulling strings, and he and her younger daughters spent several hours pulling every string they possibly could, playing with strangers, and having the most marvelous time. They were still talking about it a week later. How cool is that?

The underside of the sculpture

Caitlind Brown beneath CLOUD after Nuit Blanche, before take-down. Photo Credit: Christina?

Of course, for Wayne Garrett and myself, Nuit Blanche was a delicate balance between trying to enjoy ourselves in the company of friends and new-friends, and knowing that tear-down would begin at 3 am. We conserved our energy, and snuck home at 2:45 for (literally) a 15-minute nap and a change of clothes (it got really cold! Especially with so little sleep in the nights leading up to Nuit Blanche). Take down was sketchy (photos to come) but the after-glow of CLOUD makes it all worth while.

During the inspection, we were informed that we’d forgotten to include four steel armatures when welding the internal structure of the CLOUD. Obviously, this was a cause for super-mega-stress on my part – there was so much to do, and so much to get done, and now we had to add new steel to the inside of the structure (which was already wired and full of delicate light bulbs) to appease the City? I was tired, frustrated, and ready to throw in the towel. Lucky for me, Wayne is a superstar, and faster than I could burst into tears, he was on top of the matter, calling our steel supplier to get the parts cut, locating the welder, making calculations…

The photos you don’t see here are of Wayne adding these parts. I was too frustrated to take any pictures, thus documenting my own annoyance. But, in the end, I think Wayne and I were both glad that we’d added the extra supports. More about that later…

That night had more challenges in store for us: at one point around 2:30 am, I had to chase three people out of the back of our supply truck and down the street to see if they’d stolen anything. I caught them, and was subsequently uncertain what to do with them then (seriously, what do you do at that point?) Then, on our way home, Wayne’s car broke down, and he had to crawl underneath his car and bang on the clutch-fluid compartment with an axe. All in all, we made it home by 4 am, just in time to sleep a few hours before starting back at the damn thing all over again.