Rocket Science is ~32 feet (10 meters) high and ~72 feet (22 meters) long, andis constructed from ~48,000 pounds (22,000 kilograms) of rusting scrap steel.The picture above shows, for scaling purposes, the artist (6 feet, 1.8 meters tall)standing inside the spaceship at upper right.
Below: Mike Nitowski, the welder from United Concrete who worked on Rocket Science, crawled 72 feet (22 meters) up the hollow tube in the fuselage and spacecraft emerging to see the fine view. The picture resembles a 1930s Soviet workers-paradise poster:
Rocket Science casts amazing shadows down on the rolling land, shadows that flow acrossthe land and move up the sloping hillside as the Earth rotates and the sun sets. Here areshadow pictures taken from my spacecraft perch looking down to the ground.
Note the distortions in the shadow shapes. In creating the piece, I expected some good shadowsto show up, but these exceeded my expectations. The distortion of the human form isan especially happy result.
The shadows formed by the 3 legs should be interesting but shadows cast by nearby treesmasked the leg shadows during this photo shoot. Eventually we'll make a time-lapse videoof one full day of shadow-flows (as Andrei Severny and I did for Larkin's Twig here).
Following an afternoon atop Rocket Science, I called for a rescue mission. Conducted byCommander Andy Conklin, the mission arrived smoothly in due course. As seen in theshadows below, Andy climbs aboard the spacecraft from the rescue vehicle:
PS: If you want to see more details about this artwork, and how the project works, you can check the Edward homepage and take a look
<http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00032r&topic_id=1&topic=Ask+E%2eT%2e>
Reference:
The work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press, viewed 9 August 2008, <http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/>
Posts
