One Lump, or Two...

Or 80,000?

This afternoon I went along to Silvercup Film Studios in Queens to help out with a Stefan Sagmeister project...

It was very exciting arriving to Silvercup studios - it's been used for loads of telly programmes and it's been in films and stuff - so it was great to be able to go there. Unfortunately, apart from a load of big trucks outside, there wasn't much to see... but still - I can now say I've been inside.

I found out about the project on twitter, when Sagmeister's studio said they were looking for volunteers to help with a project. So I emailed to find out more and was sent directions to the studios and told that it would involved making stuff out of sugar cubes.

When I arrived one of Sagmeister's team, Simon (a very nice German chap) showed me round and explained that they were building big letters that would spell TYPOGRAPHY out of sugar cubes - 80,000 of them in fact!

They'd been working solidly, all day and all night for the whole week and today was their last day of work - it looked like they still quite a bit to do, but there were a few people there helping out.

My job was to make tiles out of the sugar cubes (which aren't cubes at all, they're cuboids!) - 6 lump x 6 lump tiles, held together with a special icing/egg/glue concoction. It was pretty messy, but oddly therapeutic.

The tiles were then put together to build the sides of the big letters...

You can see the T in the front - each letter's roughly a foot deep and 2 or 3 feet tall.

The plan is to have a 3D modeling projection thing projected onto the letters that's somehow linked up to a facial recognition camera that can tell if you're smiling or frowning. When you smile the colours will be all bright and the projection will be active, and when you frown the projection will stop... I think that's the plan anyway...

There were some really nice people there, from all over the world, some German, some Swedish, an Australian guy, and me... there were some Americans too. I was sitting on a table with a girl who'd just left Pentagram! Although she wasn't exactly the chattiest of people, I got the impression she might have been fired from Pentagram, she didn't seem as enthusiastic or as excited about the fact that she used to work there as I was... Oh well. I'll have her job!

It was a fun way to spend a few hours on a cold and drizzly afternoon, and it was nice to meet some other designer types and do something that meant getting our hands dirty for a change. It was great to be in a film studio too, with all the lighting rigs and camera dolly's around, there were even Evian water sprays lying around - I didn't even know they made them! It was all very impressive.

The view from the loo was pretty impressive too...

The Happy Show opens at the Institute of/for Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia on Wednesday - luckily it runs until August, so Abi and I will have plenty of time to go and see how the sugar lumps ended up looking. I can't wait!