The Honey Trap
ANIMUS attended the PEX Summer Festival 2010, where we were one of many fantastic artists awarded grants by PEX.
Here are some images of the Honey Trap, where we built a unique portion of the Honey Trap specifically for the PEX Summer Festival.
Photography by Ted Stein, www.tedstein.com
Photography by Ted Stein, www.tedstein.com
Here is the Honey Trap as of June:
The two central themes of “The Honey Trap” are the merits and disadvantages of big cities, as well as the inherent relationships between architecture and nature. Whereas some might consider a metropolis unnatural, “The Honey Trap” attempts to represent the similarities between what we humans do as a population, and an instance of a metropolis in the animal world. We find the most identifiable features of a metropolis to be population and architecture.
The overall composition of “The Honey Trap” is a Fibonacci spiral. In mathematics, this spiral is based on a sequence of numbers known as the Golden Ratio. These numbers appear everywhere in nature: the leaf arrangement in plants, the pattern of the florets in a flower, a single cell, a grain of wheat, a hive of bees, and even our own faces and bodies. This same shape is found in much classical architecture, such as The Pantheon and The Great Mosque of Kairouan. Fibonacci numbers are a fascinating conceptual pivot point between the architecture of nature and the architecture of man.
The structure is made out of interlocking honeycombs, and each individual cell of the honeycomb is large enough to hold one seated person. This will visually frame each person much like a person is framed in a window. It’s a reference to what one sees, when looking across the way, into buildings in a big city. With the visual isolation of each individual in their honeycomb cell, we hope to draw upon the feelings of alienation one can get living in a buzzing metropolis. Simultaneously, and conversely, the cells being stacked together are an allusion to the coming together of individuals. They represent the literal and figurative “building up” of a city, a society, and a community. There is a sweetness to big city life, a sweetness that can inevitably make it hard to leave, thus: “The Honey Trap”.
Lastly, we propose to create a 6 foot flower inside the spiral. To contrast to the simple solidity and mathematical arrangement of the wooden honeycomb cells, this flower will be organic, ornate, and visually delicate. With it, we attempt to add an element of discovery upon approaching the piece. Extrapolating on the theme, this flower, this element of grace, is both the by-product and the life-source of the bee and we hope it might be seen as a metaphor for things like art and culture. Our metropolises make incredible things of beauty which are, in turn, what make beautiful metropolises thrive.
Capitalizing on the theme of Metropolis, ANIMUS plans to build the “The Honey Trap” in three sections. We will bring each section to separate Burning Man regional festival throughout the spring/summer of 2010. At each festival, the participants will be encouraged to help stain the wood, from shades of honey yellow to brown, thus providing a prolonged, collective, interactive experience. The project will be the culmination of many people, from many different cities, coming together to make this giant work of art. We will work with the individual festivals to raise funds for transporting the project to and from site locations.
Completed, “The Honey Trap” is completely climbable. Each cell will provide a comfortable place for a person to sit, with the cells toward the top of the artwork providing a place to look out over open playa. At the eye of the spiral the cells are close enough together that groups of people can talk to each other.
At night, each cell will have it’s own LED light source. These lights will be hooked up to a 16 channel sequencer that will allow participants, from nearby controls, to alter the speed, order, and duration that each cell is lit. In addition, they will simultaneously be able to control the color and sparkle of the flower. The result will be a color changing flower amidst a twinkling city of lights.
Our goal is to burn “The Honey Trap” at the end of the festival, providing a peaceful site for a communal gathering. The LED light sources would be removed and we will remove the flower and bring it back to New York. The flower would be displayed at the NYC Decom, viscerally and visually connecting Decom to the grand event inthe desert.
