Decompression came and went without any announcement of there being any deathtraps there, but onf of the kid-sized ones was indeed there. Also, this coming weekend (Aug. 17-18), the deathtraps will be part of the Figment festival on Olympic Island.

Didn’t get a chance to post a recap of th deathtraps at Burnorexia in April. Needless to say, the knee injury was not a result of deathtrap play (the person injured had a pre-existing condition and was simply dancing too hard).

Also since the last post irq42 was held, spanning Fountain Enterprises, and Lagar–a pair of bars two doors down from each other. One of the deathtraps was set up on the sidewalk between them to engage entertain people walking between the spaces. Some play was recorded as a video:

On Saturday, April 14th, Miss Scott will be set up as a vendor table at Burnorexia to solicit donations for her ongoing transformation into the 5 cubes sculpture. In order to help coax donations out of people’s pockets, there will also be a kid-sized deathtrap and a grown-up-sized deathtrap set up somewhere on/around the dancefloor (and donations will be considered an acceptable bribe for us deathtrap-familiar volunteers to teach the donors some tricks and games). Come. Play. Bring money 🙂

The 5 Cubes project (of which the original geodesic deathtrap is phase 1) recently completed phase 2. While I think this is a wonderful development, there is the slight catch that phase 3 is the expensive phase (it will require around $800 in materials to actually build it). So this means that there will be some fundraising.

While I’m hoping to raise a bunch of the funds through fun deathtrap-related activities/events (e.g. a deathtrap busking picnic), I would like to get to work on phase 3 sooner rather than later, so I’m going to pass the hat around the internet and ask you to please donate, and pass this link around to your friends (except I’m not asking all the helpful deathtrap people who’ve already contributed piles of their time and energy to donate money too; you guys can just spread the word).

Thanks.

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After getting a bunch of pictures of deathtraps at events, figuring that such events should be blogged about in a deathtrap-centric location, and deciding that the retro-static-HTML site was going to be too much hassle to do all that with, I’ve gone and put together a new website, and filled in some back-entries for events that have already taken place. There are still photo galleries to be set up, and a mailing list widget to be bolted in, but at this point, it’s certainly no worse than the old site (and unlikely to be brought to its knees by any future work), so here it is.

With the deathtraps having been to Burning Man, they were in need of some decompression as much as any burner, so the pair that were brought out to Nuit Blanche also got set up at Decomp. The kid-sized deathtrap was placed in the dance/sound-camp sort of area, and the grown-up-sized deathtrap had a hammock made for its inside, and was set up in the quieter, more chilled out area. There were a few problems with the hammock, but they were fixed quickly enough, and the night went quite well.

Between TEDxToronto and Nuit Blanche, I was able to rustle up enough spare hands (and material) to churn out another grown-up-sized deathtrap, so that Nuit Blanche could (unofficially) feature a deathtrap of each size. Owing to some boat stuff earlier in the day, we didn’t get started until around midnight, but we started with a good crowd of friends and supporters to help assemble the deathtraps on Bay St., just north of Queen, invited the night’s revellers to help us roll them up towards the Heart Machine, and had gotten almost all the way to Dundas when it started to rain, and the deathtraps became too slippery to be safely climbed on. (Psst: no one’s actually been hurt on one of these things badly enough to require medical attention; it can be our little secret that the deathtraps aren’t actually all that deadly.)

So with the rain coming down, we carried the deathtraps the rest of the way up to THM to say “hi” to the artists there, take the deathtraps apart, and see if we could bum a ride home for them (their ride down having disappeared with a certain small child who finally had to get taken home to bed).

Once again, enormous amounts of fun were had.

Shortly before Burning Man, I was invited to exhibit a deathtrap at the after party for the TEDxToronto 2011 talks. With both the grown-up-sized deathtraps made so far having been given away at the burn, Miss Scott was pressed into service. There was some good fun had on them before someone connected to insurance noticed that if the trampoline performers weren’t covered to allow party guests on to their trampoline, then guests playing on the deathtraps were almost certainly not covered either. That said, there were still enough “performers” and deathtrap crew to have a good time on the deathtrap.

On a less positive note, by the end of the night, Miss Scott’s struts were starting to show some early signs of fatigue, so she’s being retired from service as a deathtrap and returned to the 5-cubes project in order to be able to continue it.

Miss Scott and 4 new deathtraps (2 grown-up-sized, 2 kid-sized) made the trek down to Black Rock City for Burning Man. All 5 were initially set up by Tuesday in KidsVille, and on Friday, two of them were carted out to the open playa (where it was pretty quickly discovered that their lighting was inadequate, and they were placed near the DMV sign to keep them from being run into/over/etc).

3 of the deathtraps were given away as gifts (both of the grown-up-sized ones, and one of the kid-sized ones) and the remaining two were brought back to Toronto to be available for planned appearances at TEDxToronto, and Nuit Blanche.

What was originally brought to decomp as “Dodecahedron Phase 1” has been enjoyed so much that (until I feel ready to return it to the 5-cubes project) it has also become the first of the geodesic deathtraps. I had a good time playing with it, but an even better time watching other people have a good time playing with it.