Wild Things Juke Box

We’ve been looking round for just the right sized flight cases to load everything in to and it seems they just don’t make them so been on to the people at Dragon Cases who are making bespoke cases for us and now busy getting hold of all the other bits and bobs for the big build day.

There’s always that terrible ‘Spinal Tap’ moment I always have when ordering things that have to be made to make sure we don’t end up with our equivalent of a scale model of Stone Henge! I’ve chekced and checked again though.

This week we’re going to concentrate on loading the App up with all the music and work out the best way for all the photos and biogs to appear for the exhibition audience.

The gaffer arrived thank you Unibond! The head was still sitting over three heaters and there was one part still sticky and gooey. Whilst drying, Matthew made some ears and we then cut up the tape. There was a bit of excitement for us as we blew a fuse when we put the radio on. We located the fault to a dodgy extension cable. Once fired up again we had classic FM blaring (Matthew’s choice) and the head dried off quickly once we taken off all the plastic to allow more air to circulate. We were able to improve on the shape by carving with a serrated bread knife. The small plastic model was really useful for this. Once the head was carved and bits of shaped insulating foam added to areas of need, we were ready to begin taping the beast all over. Supplied with a table full of torn pieces we set to work until it was covered.

Then the detail. ears, eyes, lips and nostrils. These were all made separately with the same two materials and then added. Over tea we looked at areas that needed adjustments which resulted in cutting a bit more off the horn, it was a bit too fat. Matthew attached the ears to the front horn which I thought looked rather good, but we decided the audience would find this arrangement a bit hard to cope with so with a bit of anatomical research Matthew positioned them on top of the head. Jo came in to the finished product and took some photos of us posing.

One down and two to go!

Matthew and I are to make a rhino head for the wild things jukebox. The rhino head is the logo for wild things music. The idea was to use this huge powerful image of a rhino as a place/hook for the headphones, which will allow an audience to listen to their selected tracks on the jukebox.

I met at the Blue Room, Phoenix, in Brighton. This is the studio of the Rocket artists of which Matthew is one. I came with a trolley full of resources and images of rhinos, which I had collected from the Natural History Museum in London. We were keen to make the rhinos have their but during my recce I could see that there really was no space for this kind of activity. The Natural History Museum have four full-size rhinos and the baby. Some were larger than others but they were all still huge. They were black rhinos, which meant that they were grey in colour. We began by making drawings from the photographic images and video I’d made which we viewed on the computer. This gave us a sense of shape, form, and texture of the rhino.

We then made a paper pattern for a plywood inner structure. To aid our model making we had a small scaled model from the Natural History Museum to work from to help us get the correct dimensions.

Having drawn round the paper pattern on the plywood I cut it out with a jigsaw. We also needed a disc with a hole in it at the back of the head to enable us to attach it to the lid of the flight case. We added a few blocks and screws the extra strength and very strangely put the structure into a black bin bag with the horn poking through the bottom, just like your rubbish does to annoy you. We tapped the bag to the structure to make a kind of rhino head shaped balloon. We adorned surgical gloves, sprayed water into the inside, then vigorously shook a can of insulating expanding foam for 30 seconds. We took turns to squirt, shake, and squirt again. The expanding foam gushed out expanding madly for a while, then it ran out of energy and kind of dribbled out with less gusto. When the can was finished we allowed the insulating foam to continue expanding and we manipulated the contents by pushing it around the balloon so that it was filling all the right places to create the rhino head shape.

August 2012

The idea is to create something that’s easy to use and fits with a rock ‘n roll look so after initial ideas about ‘tardis’ style central consoles we’ve come up with the idea of fixing an iPad in to a flightcase and making a sculpture of our famous rhino head logo as a real headphone stand.

There’s a long history of collaborative arts in the UK and Side By Side is a groundbreaking exhibition drawing together international artists with and without learning disabilities to showcase some of the very best in collaborative arts.

Wild Things was a project started by the punk Heavy Load to showcase music made by people with learning disabilities from around the world. This year, with funding from the Arts Council, we’re putting all this music in to a touchscreen juke box to be exhibited at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in the Side By Side exhibition.

This blog will keep you updated on the building of the jukebox.