All images courtesy of The Cat and Cradle Collective, CAD image: Nick Lauder
A considerably larger-than-life typewriter is coming to Burning Man this year, adding a surreal flourish to the festival’s temporary extradimensional appeal. Constructed by artist Jason Turgeon and his motley crew at the Cat and the Cockroach Collective, The Blunderwood Portable magnifies the mechanics, shape, and scale of a 1927 Underwood Standard Portable Typewriter by a factor of 24. The final product will tower at 8' high, with a 20' square structure, and a 10' tall screen standing in as the machine’s paper. “We're a society that communicates largely with keyboards,” comments Turgeon in the project’s press release, “whether on our phones or tablets or laptops, and those keyboards are all based on the old typewriters that many of us still remember growing up with.”
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To tie together many generations of typing technologies, the artists plan to fashion the Blunderwood’s colossal keyboard into an interactive light show. While during the day, 16' letterpress billboards, emblazoned with early 20th century poems from the newspaper cartoon characters Archy and Mehitabel will be displayed alongside the work, at night, participants will be invited to scribe their own sonnets by trooping across the 14”-wide typewriter keys. As Turgeon explains, “The giant typewriter—through our nighttime projection of characters onto the ‘paper’ screen as people walk around the keyboard—provides a platform for self-expression on a grand scale using a platform that everyone is intuitively familiar with.”Once completed, the project will first debut at public arts event, FIGMENT Boston, before traveling cross-country to rise above the cracked earth and bare-backed inhabitants of the Black Rock Desert. See more renderings, in-progress shots, and a busy timelapse of a day of building, below:
CAD image: Nick Lauder
Architectural model of the device by Finn McCool. Photo: Jason Turgeon.
Team member Michael Dewberry applies a protective coat of paint to the metal key supports. Photo: Jason Turgeon.
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