My friends at Squid:Labs are doing an installation at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum for an exhibition on “Extreme Textiles”. Their exhibit is called “Rope and Sound”, and it’s essentially a three-dimensional harp with three steel pillars each holding each other up with rope strung between them. The rope is Squid:Labs’ electronic rope, so the ropes are going to be hooked up to a computer which will then play sounds or music as the ropes are plucked. Should be really neat when it all comes together.

Anyway, installation was happening this week, and they needed some help with the physical labor of actually assembling the thing. And when they found out I was going to be there on vacation, they asked me if I’d be willing to lend a hand. I said sure, figuring that it’s not often one gets to help with a museum installation. And it was fun – we polished up the steel pillars, and then manhandled them into place on a scaffolding, which was needed because the sculpture is not self-supporting until a bunch of the ropes are tightened. Once in place, we started threading the ropes, which was a kind of a fun puzzle as we tracked down which ropes went where. A break for lunch, and then back for a few hours of tying knots and starting to tension the ropes, until the thing was stable. We removed the scaffolding, and voila. You can see a terrible picture taken with the Sidekick of it at this stage. I think I’ll be using my camera rather than my Sidekick from now on. Dan was going to spend the rest of the week finishing the connections, and then working out the software for connecting sound to movement. I’m hoping to stop by on Friday to see the (hopefully) finished piece.

Afterwards, we went back to where they were staying near the lower tip of Manhattan, went out to dinner at one of the Indian restaurants along 6th St near 1st Ave, and then I called it a night.