BLINK – Memorial Hall Donor Event 2023

“String Theory for Dummies: Redux”

I’ve developed a great relationship with the people who manage BLINK in Cincinnati and the fact that my installation from the 2022 event was perhaps the single most photographed piece, we’ve stayed in close contact. Everything aside though, I was very excited when the Cincinnati Regional Chamber of Commerce and ArtsWave (major managers of the BLINK) asked me to re-create my “String Theory for Dummies” piece for a Re-Live BLINK donor event being held at Memorial Hall in downtown Cincinnati. The organizers were adamant that people be allowed to interact with the piece and toss yarn around add to the piece themselves, if interested. Memorial Hall is a storied and stoic theater, being one of the oldest in the city and most of the fixtures are original, so both I and the Memorial Hall staff were very careful to avoid any damage to the building.

Ultimately, for attachment points we settled on using the wood beams which create the top of the door jamb and the bottom of the transom windows along each of the six double-door entranceways in the hall’s two adjacent first-level banquet halls. I first created a basic net-like structure using woven strands of paracord and black yarn that stretched between the tops of each doorway along the length of the hallway. From there I began attaching multicolored UV yarn which was brought down to the ground where it attached to pre-made black hook boards which were anchored to the floor with black buckets with weights used as ballasts.

True to the concept, visitors were invited to add their own touches of yarn – and several did. I left the piece to grab food and came back to see 4-5 balls of yarn had been started on the piece. Below I’ve included pictures and video from both the original setup and after donors added their own elements. You can also find a time-lapse video below showing the entire setup process. Installation began at 10am and the piece was finished in time for a 6pm event start time.

The entire hallway was about 40′ long and 15′ wide