HARMONY-2008




Gary Stadler

2008 Playa installation

"HARMONY" by
Gary Stadler
email: gareee@heartmagic.com
Phone
address: PO box 675561, Rancho Santa Fe, Ca 92067


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


In 2005 and 2007, I did the Innermind project at Burning Man. It was a great experience, and things went pretty much to plan... well...
except the amazing 135mph winds last year that destroyed most of it.

This year, I am building a different type of structure + interactive sound and lighting experience-

HARMONY


(2) Physical Description:
Harmony is a "dome-like" structure but built on entirely different principles and designs than anything seen before. Based on the graceful sacred geometry of curved lines of the twelve petaled lotus (rather than the angular triangles of the typical geodesic dome), it is extremely graceful and beautiful. This is an actual photo (retouched to remove the background) of a wire frame mockup of the fiberglass structure:



Harmony is an enclosed structure approximately 50 feet in diameter and 25 feet high at the center, . . The exterior is skinned in heavy white canvas fabric. Not an inflatable structure.

Note:
After learning experience with the Innermind Project vs 100mph+ wind gusts last year, this year we have decided to work with low-lying rigid structure rather than inflatables, to ensure the installation may remain open during the full festival for participant interaction.


The outside of the structure will be lighted at night with the same blue-cloud nebula and green faerie star lasers that were used for the Innermind Project, and with the light beam from the Innermind project shooting out of the top at night





The construction materials are: Pultruded fiberglass rectangular rods for the structure and heavy canvas type material for the covering.


Six interactive stringed musical instruments (identical to the one I built for Innermind last year) will allow people to interact and make music, generating harmony together. Depending on how they are played, they can create beautiful music, screeching or howling sounds, or ultimate harmony


The sound system will be a 6 channel/ speaker / amplifier system to provide individual amplification for the 6 interactive stringed instruments. Total sound wattage is around 500 watts for the enitre installation.






(3) Philosophical Statement:

Harmony is an invitation to enter into the intimate dreamspace of the heart, the white twelve-petaled lotus temple, and co-create in community new visions of sound and new textures of light. Within Harmony , we play out the American dream, immersing ourselves in an evolutionary microcosm of creation, discovery, balance between ebb and flow, chaos and cosmos, control and surrender, so that we as diverse peoples may offer our inspiration as a vision for the rest of the world.

The form of Harmony is the heart chakra, an energetic vortex of lotus loving, manifest in architecture as a Temple of Potential. Within the twelve-fold lotus structure, modern and ancient come together. laser light inside creates the ancient symbol of balance, two equilateral triangles intersecting and interpenetrating, symbolizing the essential male and female energies and the balanced polarities of matter and spirit.

Within this sacred space, participants may play any one of six Ombasses, custom-made stringed instruments tuned in harmony with each other, each approximately five feet long and placed at the vertices of the intersected triangles. The sound produced by the umbasses, which can be plucked, strummed, or played with anything from sticks to a bow, ranges from sounding like sitar or cello, to being like the siren cries and groans of whale song or the mystical emanations of deep space.

Photo of three wooden Ombass instruments
from a microtonal muesum in San Diego



Here's a short 2 minute audio clip (MP3) of what a single Ombass sounds like, being played by one person...


OmbassMP3