INNERMIND-2007








Gary Stadler and Bryce Kuhlman

Proposal for a 2007 Deep-Playa installation

"INNER MIND" by
Gary Stadler & Bryce Kuhlman
email: gareee@heartmagic.com
Phone 858 414 5100
address: PO box 675561, Rancho Santa Fe, Ca 92067


CLICK HERE for Gary Stadler's Artistic History at Burning Man


In 2005, Bryce and I were given a grant from Burning Man to do the Innermind project. It was a great experience, and things went pretty much to plan... well...

We managed to get the installation up and running, and despite some problems with the winds and a few structural issues, it was a great success. Last year you gratiously awarded us a small "return" grant to improve Innermind and bring it back for 2006. Unfortunately the high-tech central column we made failed a very harsh wind-load test and literally exploded a couple months prior to the burn, and it did enough damage to the structure that there was no way we could pull it off for 2006. So tail between legs, we gave back the grant money and came without it. Hopefully we will be bringing it back again this year, with some important improvements and no more explosions!!. What happened? In a nutshell and without going into deep technical explanations, the company we worked with did a miscalculation in the tensile strength of the column, and specified that we operate it at 10 PSI. In retrospect, 10PSI is the most dangerous pressure to operate a structure such as this- 5 psi would have been safe, as would 25-50 PSI. But at 10 PSI the hoop-stress of the column plus the ability to deflect under load caused it to rupture when placed in a simulated high-wind overload. Now that it's in the past, the math suggests it would do exactly as it did. So this time we're redesigning it to operate at 50 PSI which gives us a 5:1 safety margin.

This project is a joint effort by myself and Bryce Kuhlman, who is a very talented computer and software wizard, plus our crew. Bryce is responsible for the digital systems and I concentrate on the hardware aspects. We are both working together almost daily on the project, in fact we've already started upgrading quite a lot of the things that you saw in 2005.

Innermind is a complex inflatable structure 85 feet in diameter and 35 foot high on the outside, with a 40 foot diameter sphere inside it, held up by a central inflatable air-column made just like my rainbow tower (mentioned above in "My artistic history at Burning Man").





STRUCTURE AND SUPPORT


The entire installation is mainly air-supported. Basically the outer cone is attached solidly to the ground by 56 screw augers placed into the Playa around it's circumference, and it is erected and held up solely by a central blower-inflated column.
The perimiter is "sealed" to the ground by a 3" diameter vinyl swimming-pool drain hose filled with water, that is sewn into a pouch that goes around the entire perimiter of the cone, acting as a well-distributed weighted "gasket".

The outer structure is made of two-color rip-stop material, white on the outside and black on the inside. The main function of the outer structure is to protect the inner sphere from the forces of heat, wind, rain, etc, as well as keeping light out during the daytime. Because of it's shape and structure, it is quite resistant to wind and weather, and because of it's outer white reflective color and the airflow paths, it remains cool inside under the sun.




Hanging outside in the very top of the central support column isa 2,500 watt HMI light configured to make a bright white light beam shooting straight up into the sky, as seen in the photos from 2005...looks pretty cool!!.

POWER for the installation will be provided by a sound-attenuated 20kw generator trailer located 100' away from the structure, with a buried cable. The generator holds roughly 200 gallons of diesel fuel in a UL approved dual wall secondary containment style tank, which is able to fully power the system for the entire event, non-stop- nice to not have fueling issues during the event!!.




INSIDE THE STRUCTURE...


The Inner Sphere

The inner sphere is made of totally black ripstop material, and the central air-support column is made of white ripstop.
The inside of the sphere represents of the nerves inside a brain, with a lot of artistic license.... so participants at the event walking into the installation will be walking into the insides of someone's head... a giant, very active brain.






The NEURAL NET




This visual part of this installation will be based on the work we did for 2005- 200 or more strings of RGB LED's,
with the LED's inside translucent corrugated tubing .
The strings represent "nerves" and be between 5 and 15 feet in length... there are 2500 Led's in all. We suspend these strings everywhere inside the sphere above people's heads, in a fairly random organization in three dimensional space. Due to the inherent darkness of the inside of the black sphere, it has a very "infinite " inner-space look, because you cannot see the walls of the sphere.

The way the strings work is, a "light packet" of data is launched into the end of a string by a computer that gathers data from audio and interatcive inputs. The first LED receiving this "packet" of data glows brightly at a color and duration determined by the data packet that is launched, and when it's job is over it passes the "light packet" on to the next LED which will do the same thing. It will look something like a chaser, but since what actually happens is determined by the packet of data that can be manipulated and modified as it gets passed thru the network, a color might,for example, initially be red and be moving slowly thru the strings, but as it progresses it would be able to gracefully change to purple and accelerate in speed as it makes it's way thru the network.

The LED strings are joined together in a "neural network" by a few hundred "axion" circuit boards, each of which terminates an incoming string and has 2-to 5 outgoing strings hooked to it. Each of those outgoing strings is in turn terminated by another axion board that has 2-5 more strings leaving it. Each axion board has a microprocessor on it that can make changes to the parameters of the light packets coming in, and send them to any, all, or none of the outgoing strings attached to it, at random as it decides.



Thus there is a thick, rich matrix of colored light shooting around and interconnected in three dimensions of space inside the sphere, representing what happens in the nerves and axions of a real brain!

The mood of what's visulally happening in the LED matrix will change with interactive and audio inputs, sometimes soft, dim and slow, sometimes fast and lively.


The central Air Support Column

The central air suport column is tightly inflated by a small high pressure fan and functions as the secondary vertical support for the entire structure. Being made of white fabric material, it also lends itself quite nicely to rear-projection. Inside this column is a lightweight backup truss system that keeps everything up during excessively windy periods.


SOUND and SOUND SYSTEM

Located in the area between the sphere and the outer cone will be a substantial surround-sound system. The sounds that are heard will be original-composition soundscapes that will lend themselves to enhance the visual experience inside the sphere. Currently planned is a computer interface that creates some percentage of the the lighting mood as a direct result of the sounds being heard by visitors.
...Also there will be interactivity; some of what the lights inside do will be interactively based on what visitors create via microphones strategically placed within the structure

Past problems




There were a few things in 2005 that we didn't anticipate... for starters a cold front coming through during our setup days brought with it winds that kept us from doing meaningful work for three days, which then made things much too "Close" in timing. Due to that, we did not get the installation opened until Mid week, where we had planned on opening it starting the first day that the event would be opened to the public.
So this year, the plan is to arrive on the playa a full week in advance, giving us some buffer time if the weather gets nasty.

The other major thing that happened was an engineering issue. The entire support for the structure is air...everything is air-inflated and the majority of the outer cone was held up by the eight foot diameter air-inflated column. It worked wonderfully...until the winds picked up past 20MPH or so, then it became painfully obvious to me that it wasn't strong enough. I had actually done the calculations and somewhere I screwed up... the planned column was supposed to be able to hold up about 1500 pounds, but the reality was that it was only sufficient to hold up about half of that. So the result was, as the winds picked up, the installation started to distort and deflect to the point that we had to take it down twice during the event 'till the winds went away. This was never a dangerous situation to either the structure or humans, but it was, to me, a little too weird, and it created too much "down time" for my happiness.

With the new inner truss backup system, the current support system is a LOT stronger, capable of holding up many times the load that Innermind can create.


Our crew will consist of 15 seasoned Innermind burners, most of whom have worked on the Innermind project in the past. We will arrive a full week early so we have enough time to put it up and get it running even if we have a few days of adverse weather. Cleanup, no problem since the installation is an inflated structure, there are no nails, wood residues, construction moop etc to be left behind. We simply deflate it, roll it up and away we go. In 2005 the major moop problem was that every time we cleaned up, within minutes the winds would blow in moop from elsewhere on the playa that we'd clean up again... we did something like 5-6 cleanups in all, and none of it was generated by our project- it all blew in!!!

Burning Man has been a great inspiration to me and will continue to be one of the main artistic focal points of my life. Thank you for being, Burning Man! It will be a wonderful opportunity for Bryce and I to share our artistic visions once again with you and the world!

Gary Stadler
Bryce Kuhlman