Literation Levitation

This is Jeff Koons' energizer bunny inflatable being towed through the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade:

And this is Blockhead, the (relatively tame) Paul McCarthy inflatable sculpture outside of the Tate Modern in London:

And one more McCarthy, inflatable pigs...

You can also google his Santa with butt-plug piece, but that's a bronze and I'm really interested in inflatables.

You may be wondering what this has to do with our class. I've been sort of inspired by inflatables and parades lately. There is something about the scale and/or levitation of these pieces that seems to create the monolithic experience (as we were previously talking about) that is so out of scale with the human body, and yet. They are still basically over-blown (ha!) balloons. The juxtaposition between the sublime quality of the monolith and the carnivalesque sensibility of the balloon really excites me. And then, in addition, the element of parade that I think that inflatables beg for is also interesting; the participation, the idea of walking art like you might walk a dog, but a really really big floating dog...

What I haven't seen is giant inflatable text. And that's sort of what I'd like to do...a sentence parade. Because then each letter is also an object, and the composition of the words, and of the sentences, becomes a slippery sort of project. You experience the letters one by one as monolithic objects, but then also there is a developing sense of meaning or comprehensibility that the monolith initially seems antagonistic toward. That tension makes me excited, and it also seems like CalArts could really use a balloon parade because it is starting to get warm and nice outside.

I don't know how to make giant inflatables, but I think it could be interesting to learn. I don't know what the sentence should be. Kristin suggested "The sentence does not exist" and I got pretty excited about it, because I thought it was funny and smart and just the right sort of familiar and yet obtuse. But can we workshop some alternate sentences? Anyone want to help me make a letter parade?

Ok. Hope everyone's spring break was lighter than air.

Updates!
There was some interest in the discussion of how to make inflatables, and here is the resource that I was looking at:
AKAirways
AKAirways is a very open-source community. Their inflatables are hung, rather than floated, so I think we'd have to employ some trial-and-error experimenting to figure out how to levitate them.

If I brought in some sheet plastic and a fan, might we be interested in trying to make a very simple circle inflatable in class next week?