fabricating a large-scale kinetic sculpture for Burning Man — welding, grinding, plasma cutting, from raw metal stock
Working directly under artist Adrian Landon to fabricate The Sound of Time — a large-scale kinetic sculpture for Burning Man. This project has been my deepest dive into heavy metal fabrication: welding structural steel, plasma cutting sheet metal, grinding welds smooth, and drilling with a magnetic drill. Everything built from raw stock, desert-ready for Black Rock City.
Within the larger sculpture, Adrian has assigned me a specific sub-project: designing a fully mechanical system to automate the playing of 7 Himalayan singing bowls. The bowls will cycle through 8 Hindustani ragams throughout the day — each raga mapped to a prahara, the classical Indian concept of how mood and emotion shift with the time of day. The concept is mine: borrowing the prahara framework from classical Indian music and embedding it into the sculpture's sonic logic, so the piece literally sounds different at dawn, midday, and midnight.
The mechanism needs to be entirely mechanical — no motors, no electronics — and desert-ready for Black Rock City's conditions. Design is in progress.
In Hindustani classical music, a prahara is a 3-hour window of the day, each carrying its own emotional quality. Different ragas are prescribed for different praharas — performing the "wrong" raga at the wrong time is considered aesthetically dissonant. Varsha mapped this system onto the sculpture's playing cycle so the bowls literally sound different in the morning vs the afternoon vs the evening.