Balloons on a balcony

Greetings!

At this site, you will find photos and video taken in Madison, Wisconsin, USA during January 2014.  They tell quiet stories of what happened near Lake Mendota. We intended to make a small art project on New Year's Eve, which is our yearly tradition, but this project continued, and in fact ballooned, until a month had passed.  Ultimately we sent these "posts" as emails to our collaborators across the ocean.  We've archived them here for posterity as blog posts.

The originally designed project (known now as The Finale) is on the second page, which you can find by scrolling to the bottom of this page and clicking "older posts."  Please do!  Or you could go directly using these links:

Finale part 1 (link),

Finale part 2 (link)

But of course we hope you will enjoy the whole story, which starts below.  Just keep reading, and click "older posts" when you get to the bottom!

Let's begin.

We found all these strange translucent objects on our balcony.  We love balloons!

Blobs, uncovered!

Then, we unwrapped the balloons to see what they contained.  They were strangely solid.  Indeed, there was a shining ice blob inside every balloon!  We were expecting air or helium or water.  

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Snow fell and did strange things to their otherwise shiny texture.

Blobs improving Madison

Installment 3 shows some blobs in their early winter migrations.  They nest in strange places, like porches, bus stops, and floating ice.

These were on Lake Mendota.  Blobs seem to like Lake Mendota.

These were discovered on Lake Monona, apparently trying to brighten the same very dreary winter day.

Perhaps you might recognize one of these porches.

For all we know, the blobs might still be on those porches, even today!

Blobs befriending trees

Blobs and trees have a natural affinity, in addition to their affability.

When the wind picks up the snow and blows it across the lake, sometimes it looks like trees grow in the lake!  On this day, blobs grew on the trees.

Place blobs, incubate, marvel!

I should start this installment with an admission that we were involved with creation and placement of these blobs.  Sometimes.  Anyway, we left the blobs alone in the world for a few days so we could see how the bus riders would react to blobs at their bus stop, and so we could see how James Madison Park users would react to blobs around trees.  AWESOMELY, is the answer.

Unknown actors improved the tree arrangement.

We decided to follow their vision and improve it with even more blobs.

Also, apparently people who wanted to own their very own blobs were willing to trade things, like sunglasses.  Excellent.  

 Blobs did not stay long at the bus stop.  We replaced them often, and found a few of them random distances away, broken or not.  

So now we we are performance artists ;)

Confession two: we made a point of walking by and noticing a misplaced blob and saying something like "oh cool pretty blob, wonder how it got there!"  That's how we roll, sometimes.

Yay!

Snow is unkind to visionary ice blob art

Greetings once again!

More time passed.  Snow fell.  Blobs became obscured by snow.  We noticed, among other things, that the oddly deep snow around the JMP tree was deep because it was in fact a snowdrift in natural place for a deep snowdrift!  Apparently a natural place for a snowdrift is a bad place for blobs, as we discovered when more snow fell and the wind blow once again.

In addition, the sun came out, irradiating our blobs with no mercy.  Apparently the dyes rapidly bleach when exposed to direct sunlight.  Who knew? 

High winds are fun for kite-flying, but perhaps not for keeping blobs in trees.  

Finally, we closed the book on the chapter "Ice Blobs In and Around James Madison Park" and opened a new chapter: "Mysterious Ice on Lake Mendota."  

This winter has been very, very cold.  The ice is very, very thick.
It speaks to the blobs, and they respond, and so do we.

Cheers!

Mystery on Mendota, in pictures

Greetings!

In today's installment, we see the Mystery on Mendota appears to be some sort of effigy mound made of ice instead of earth.  Its exact purpose is lost in the mists of time, and unlike the mounds along the Mississippi, this one has never seen an enormous flock of Passenger Pigeons. Unlike those older mounds, this one seems to have a symbolic connection to the Wisconsin state capitol, or at least to Hamilton Street.

It appeared one sunny Saturday and dominated its local environment as the only source of bright colors.

Its local environment was near a boundary between the near-shore ice (formed in early December) and the true lake ice (formed Dec 15-17).  It is a popular spot for dog-walking and kite-snowboarding.

Who knows what might be discovered in the future, out on the ice?

Time mistreats a mound of blobs

  Today's installment shows a later part of the circle of life of blobs, so to speak.

Time was not kind to the mound of blobs.  Between sunlight, wind, and people, a mound of blobs is very dynamic, but the color saturation decreases and the snow-covering increases.  The ratio of vertical to horizontal increases.  The second law of thermodynamics applies to a mound of blobs, with a vengeance. 

Perhaps someday the water in the blobs will evaporate, rain down, infiltrate an aquifer, be brought to the surface in a well, find itself distributed by complex system of pumps and pipes, meet a balloon again, and become a new blob.  Has this happened?

Mendota Mystery will not be denied

As we saw in the last post, we found the mound in strewn and faded condition.  We rebuilt it a bit. 

Meanwhile the blobs connecting it to the Capitol had risen on pedestals, we know not how.

Later we returned to all this on the day of the blowing snow.  Others (who?) had rebuilt the mound, and it had become a snow sculpture.  That is, relentless blowing snow had turned a pile of blobs into a much bigger pile of blobs and snow.

A pyramid this size might survive for a long, long time in a cold winter. 

Holes appear in the blobs

Back on the balcony, strange shapes appeared in blobs, and bits of ice flew around as if lost, sometimes sticking to the blobs from whence they came.  Strange sounds were heard coming from the balcony.  Strange people do strange things with ice.

After all the drilling, sunlight is found in icy bottles.

The strange drilling sound we heard coming from the balcony was simply the sound of blobs making room for tea candles.  This presented some practical challenges, but it was what we wanted all along.  We made the blobs so we could do this.  Two artists, three cameras, lots of blobs!

As night fell, we did some testing.

We got excited.  From the very first, we had been hoping to see this:

In addition, we had planned to see lots of this:

And of course, we also wanted what follows in the "older" post below.