Love the Bomb – 2014

On the 4th of July at the Firefly festival, I decided to bring an art experience about the celebration of the values of the United States of America.

At that point in time, #americaparty was a popular trending hashtag, rife with pictures of people in foreign countries playing beer pong with plastic cups, eating pizza, and wearing shirts that had Greek letters. I had my friend Sonia Domkarova from the Czech Republic, who recently received her American citizenship, throw an America party. People were able to play a version of Battleship on pizza boxes with various American things on the two axes of the game, such as Planned Parenthood and Guns.

During the party the extremely dangerous bouncy bomb was revealed that David Dowling and I fabricated. A bit like a mechanical bull ride, people had to try and ride it for as long as possible before they got thrown off. An Arduino with a 9 degrees of freedom sensor was inside that tracked accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer data, sensed how fast the bomb was bouncing, and played different shows on LEDs in reaction to the gyrations.