Final Project Proposal – Henry Lam
My project proposals revolve around the area of Ridge St and Delancey St in the Lower East Side. At two separate points in time and two different locations, this intersection along the Williamsburg Bridge hosted live poultry slaughterhouses. I don’t know if the flocks of roosting pigeons ever realized the mass demise of their feathered brethren.
I would like to create a project that uses these three elements: the Williamsburg Bridge, the intersection/area around Ridge and Delancey, and birds.
- Chicken Memorial – place large flocks of life sized paper-folded birds paying their respects at the locations of the live poultry slaughterhouses.
- Bird Dropping Monster – place an oversized 3d printed pigeon roosted on the underside of the truss of the Williamsburg Bridge looking down at the potential parked cars with cast acrylic resin droppings enroute(turtle head poking)
- Pigeon Predator – place life sized 3D printed birds of prey along the underside of the outer edge of the base of the Bridge and document the pigeon population’s reaction.
Difficulties: The three ideas require gaining access to space that may not have public access. This intersection is about 100 ft from the 7th Precinct. Climbing up to the underside of the bridge is probably illegal and also physically difficult. The drop from the bridge to the ground is about 20 to 40 feet.
For the first concept (Chicken Memorial), I wonder if there are ways to craft or position the paper-folded birds so that they will encourage actual pigeons to settle on them – like a memorial that enables real birds to pay their respects. In any case, I think this is conceptually strong and perhaps easier to place than some of the other options. Furthermore, I think it ties most directly into your initial inspiration.
I think the Bird Dropping Monster idea is hilarious. Have you considered ways to make the 3D printed pigeons actually create droppings (like a mechanism that would make them extrude a tiny bit of paint or some other material)? I wonder also if you can work in some of that chicken memorial concept (if that’s important to you). The con of this concept is definitely the logistics.
This final concept might be the most risky in some ways because the interesting part of it is the pigeon’s reaction and I’d say there’s like a 65% chance that city pigeons totally do not care about birds of prey. Again, you could try to link this into the whole chicken memorial, which I think would make it stronger and more conceptually interesting.
I love the Bird Dropping idea. You can probably create them using CNC and foam core. That way you can have a effectively large sized model than the 3d print bed, and also with cheaper material.
The last idea might be fairly successful but validating it in the given timeframe will take considerable effort.
Hi Henry!
Interesting theme your diving into!
Since there are many difficulties for implementing the final work, I would say finding another good spot to place the installation would be ideal. Also, I’m not sure how would you print through school life sized 3D. If school does that type of print, it would definitely be amazing! But maybe, also because of time, you could think about scaling it down so everything works smoothly.
Also, is there any story or reason your looking into this theme?
If you have any questions about my comments let me know! Good luck!