About
The team
Nicolas is a UX designer and photographer who first got in contact with the Burning Man world by being a part of Fire Tetris' core team in 2015. He sought to create an installation where burners could live the Radical Self-Expression and Participation principles to their simplest form.
By itself, this installation isn't completely art. It needs active participants and it becomes what they want it to be.
Nicolas was helped by Laurence, who was also part of the Fire Tetris team and part of the Neighbourhood in 2014.
Building The Scream Booth
We started to imagine and prototype the project in may 2016. Early brainstorming included building the Booth out of wood, but PVC and tarps were our final choice for its simplicity and lightness. This actually was a great choice since we only had to work on the preparation of the components of the Booth for a weekend! After spending literally months on Fire Tetris, we were impressed!
The main steps were cutting the pipes at custom lengths using a handheld ratcheted PVC cutter. Other than having a sore hand and wrist for a week, it went quite smoothly. We also pre-drilled holes in the connectors to make sure that putting up the installation would be as easy as possible. Our friend Kendall helped us by sewing and putting together the curtain that separates the participants from the material for a complete Photo-Booth experience.
We prototyped many ways of mounting the camera to the structure. We ended up using a reclaimed pressed wood piece we found in the streets and fixing it to the structure using U-shaped pipe clamps. We used a tripod head screwed through the wood to make sure we could adjust the camera to our liking. The Triggertrap and mobile phone were also fixed to the plank using elastic bands. We tested a couple of things in Nicolas' living room but had never fully put the structure together!
Once on site, the structure got up quite fast. We put together the bottom and top halves separately and mounted them together afterwards. We secured what we thought were the main pressure points in the connectors with wood screws, anchored it to the ground with crappy yellow rope (never again...) and put on the first tarps on the top and back of the Booth before calling it a day.
Guess what happened that night? Yup, a full blown rain storm!
The structure survived: a couple of joints popped and the top tarp held an impressive amount of water but it was still standing! The next day was spent screwing back all the joints in place as strongly as possible, securing the (weirdly sized) tarps to the structure and testing the technical parts to make sure everything was in place.
The Scream Booth welcomed it's first participants on the opening evening of L'Osstibdurn. The next day went smoothly until mid-afternoon where another rain storm hit the festival...
After trying to minimize the damage by emptying the water accumulating on the tarps, we decided to wrap our stuff and go back to camp. Luckyly, the sun came back around 5PM and we went back to the installation. Everyone was getting out of their tents after a calm afternoon and were quite happy to scream out their frustration!
The festival ended the day after, but we still wanted to get a couple of pictures before dismantling the structure.
We were surprised how easy it was to disassemble the structure. It took us a little over 2 hours for the whole thing!
We came back tired but quite proud of our first art installation!
The next version of The Scream Booth should include custom sized tarps and a better anchoring system. We should also redesign the structure a little and might switch to custom lighting and triggering systems.
Financial support
The Scream Booth was supported in part by an art grant provided by l'Osstibdurn.