As part of a large-scale project I am currently working together with a number of Tutti Arts artists to realise a bunch of things for Oz Asia Festival 2015. In this case I have been working together with James Kurtze on a Sepeda Lampu, or a kind of illuminated pedal car. There is a bunch of background information relating to Sepeda Lampus in the previous blog post. James is an artist who has a particular interest in filmmaking and you can check out one of his great works here. The particular character that we using as the basis for this outcome is a three headed snowman. The Oz Asia Festival had it's media launch the other night and James' sepeda lampu was featured on stage, with him delivering the festival director, Joseph Mitchell, in a grand entrance on the Playhouse theatre stage. The following post gives a bit of an overview of the creative process so far.
This is James and I waiting side of stage for the moment where James rode the sepeda lampu across the stage in front of a full house at the Playhouse theatre.
The machine, here, in the last phases of it's development before the launch. The LED strips are powered by a battery carried on the bike.
A copy of James' concept drawings for the sepeda lampu served as the reference point for translation into a wire form that becomes the frame to fix the LED's to. I used a board to mark up the drawing first before manipulating the steel rod and holding it in place with some tabs before welding.
Final testing of the mechanics of the bike before committing to finishing. The wooden frame that creates the elevation for the LED frame work was
chosen over steel in order to keep weight down. The frame also is
removable in order to pack the whole lot into the back of a van. It's quite easy to see here that the basics of this sepeda lampu are formed by a pair of factory build bicycles. Whilst a number of the earlier Indonesian sepeda lampus were handmade, many of the current ones use a factory pedal car, such as a Surrey, as their base. The Surrey's are quite heavy duty and can handle being ridden every day with a full load and come with a price tag that reflects this. Our build matches the resources and short-term outcome that we are working with.
It's a little bit tricky to see in this shot with so much going on but I made a heavy weight steel frame and a set of interfaces to clamp all of the bits square before tacking.
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