As David Cross prepares for the the tryouts this week I asked him to elaborate on preparations for this new site based work.
DAVID: The tryouts are both a promotional arm of the work and an opportunity for participants to practice playing and manipulating the object and a chance for me to observe how the game will actually be played and how I might tweak the rules, duration etc. While I have a solid sense of what might transpire it is never going to be quite what I designed it to be. The weight of the structure, the capacity of players to work together and the level of difficulty were not aspects I could accurately calibrate so the tryouts will give us a much clearer sense of this and other things. We have promoted the project fairly extensively to community groups, sporting groups, interested arts people and generally cast the net as wide as possible. We begin the test this Thursday with a session with Luke Penrith and his AFL after school programme.
What has changed since the initial reccy on the location?
The initial reccy was a different beast entirely. I was originally going to work with the to-be-demolished houses as you know, and my first idea was to build a series of mazes and tunnels through a house leading to a pristinely renovated room, circa 1972 when the house was built. For a range of reasons to do with timing, availability etc that did not transpire. The second reccy was about working with the monster (sculpture) as a key site and trying to develop a work that connected with the Airds community day. The proximity of the sporting fields to the monster led me to thinking about how sport might be a useful frame from which to engage the community. The fields (all three of them) are hardly ever used and certainly not for competitive events. I wanted to utilize one of the fields (the one closest to the monster) as a site for competitive engagement, to activate a facility that had lost its use value. Not a lot has changed since the second reccy. At that point we shaped the specific location, identified the size and demarcation of the 50 meter diameter circle that makes up the playing space and figured out how the slightly spectacularize the site to build an event like quality. We have large banners, and a PA set up for a commentator. Most of the work since then (aside from having a burnt out car wreck removed from the exact spot we are playing!) has been liaising with professional footballers to secure participation of kickers, and working to build teams of players and getting the word out. While the rules have been drafted I will use this week to modify them based on what actually happens in the playing of the game itself.
How is the build taking shape?
See attached picture, the units are in Sydney. I have not seen them yet. We might need to tweak a few things such as adding helium to make them lighter, but they are effectively ready for testing this week. Should be interesting.
