Ready, Set, Axe
Sorry, I don’t know who took the picture above, but I love it. This is the story of the much anticipated, hyper publicized and brutally witnessed demise of team Back Off slash Golden Fist slash Golden Chariot slash Future Yacht or something.
Our team: Noah Waxman, Michael Rosen, Mindy Tchieu, Bobby Genalo, Scott Wayne Indiana, and me.
The objective: to create a vehicle that is powered only at startup, and only within 15 minutes.
We welded a slingshot chariot from discarded steel parts and bike wheels, and constructed the slingshot from garage springs and 2×4’s. My main contribution was the backplate of the car that edged up against the slingshot and took hours to weld:
steel welded backplate
painted
Scott, Michael, and I transported the car via subway from the Madagascar Institute shop to ITP the day before the race, and it just fit between the two doors. It was a really good conversation starter.
As we were putting finishing touches onto the golden car and assembling the sling shot, somebody was walking by with a broken golden fist from my other favorite project (made with Avery Max, Ju Yun Song, Ali Alexander, and Jack Kalish) which was the Applications class Thumb Awards award ceremony, celebrating mundane online achievements, posts, photographs, and all the one-line jewels of cleverness our classmates share with us through social networking sites. The trophies we gave out were gold painted plaster molds I made of Jack’s hand giving a thumbs up.
Plaster Thumb Award Trophies (before paint) Unfortunately they were made during a few days when there was no break from the rain, so neither the plaster or the gold paint were able to dry, adding to the structural weakness of the protruding thumb.
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As we were finishing the car somebody was walking by with a golden fist less the thumb, and somebody in the group spotted it as the perfect figurehead for our golden chariot. It was so good to see it recycled, and it was just what our chariot needed.
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Alex Kozovski took some amazing photos of the race that can be seen on his flickr page but here are a few of my favorites (click on them to browse):
[slideshow id=1 w=450 h=600]
And the results? We lost . . undeniably. It was sad. But we were featured in this epic ad for the ITP Winter Show after party by Igal Nassima.
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ITP WINTER SHOW AFTER PARTY 2010 from igal nassima on Vimeo.
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The best part of the project, by far, was how so many ITP’ers came out to watch and laugh and cheer us on. They really made it fun for us and I was glad to entertain them with our glorious loss.
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