In 2012 I participated in the San Diego CORE project. We called it Caroushell.
It was a modest-sized structure — 20 feet round by 20 feet tall — but it was complicated, since it had to move, and had many painted elements, and CNC-cut plywood animals, and hanging elements, and LED/EL lighting, and an internal stairway, and was designed to burn, with the remaining debris collected. It took us about eight months of Sundays to build it — 32 days or so — with a crew of 4 to 20 volunteers. We built and assembled it off-site in San Diego, then disassembled it, loaded it on a truck, drove it to the playa and rebuilt it. It took nearly a week with a crew of ten or so to finish the build. Call it 350 person-days, give or take.
It was up and working for about a week, with no major injuries and lots of major fun.
On Thursday, we burned it.
What they don’t tell you when you’re hammering and sawing on Sundays for eight months is what it feels like to watch the thing go. You build a community, with the art piece at the center. You burn the art piece, and the community is welded together. Emotionally it’s very deep. I’m still feeling it, years later.
I cost myself $700 or so and a few weeks of work back in 2003 to build my first art project — two disc golf baskets, one with fire, one with EL wire, and I gave away a hundred discs. That was still amateur, in a good way. Amatuer means built as an act of love. By 2012 the professionalism of the art had improved considerably, and the scale had grown. If you think a $420 ticket is expensive, try buying a $20,000 searchlight to put in the nose of the 30-foot-tall mobile rubber duck mutant vehicle you’re driving people around in for days and nights in that environment.
We left behind great memories and a stronger local community. That’s the only thing that doesn’t burn.