This week I posted a new video telling the story of my guerrilla art project from my trip to Las Vegas in November. Do you remember my “Graffiti Animation” videos from last year? Same concept except this time I put my art on slot machines instead of dumpsters.
My plan was simple. I divided the flight of a hummingbird into 15 pieces. I printed each frame of the animation on a sticker (30 in all). I would stick the hummingbirds on slot machines and photograph them. Finally I would reconstruct the animation, allowing the artifacts of Las Vegas to shine through on the edges.
Why a hummingbird? They seem to live outside of space and time, hovering for a split second, then they're gone. They can flap their wings 200 times in one second. A fraction of time, 1/3 of a millisecond, is frozen in time and distributed randomly across the city. That was the theory any way. Putting stickers on slot machines is harder than you might think.
The first time I defaced a slot machine I felt extremely self-conscious.
The second time I gained a bit of courage. By the third I was beginning to think maybe nobody cared. By the fourth, I was sure of it. I realized I was hiding in plain sight because there’s nothing unusual about a tourist with a camera. Selfies are the norm. And passersby? They are either too polite to stare or preoccupied with their own world to notice you.
But what about security? I’m not sure what it would take to get kicked out of a casino, but it’s more than putting a sticker on a slot machine. If you aren’t making a scene and there’s a chance you will spend money, authorities will look the other way. So I started taking risks.
The card table? Why not? Roulette wheels? Go for it.
I visited as many casinos as I could before I ran out of stickers. My graffiti wouldn’t last long. A soon as it was noticed, it was gone, as if it had never existed. Maybe it was the security cameras, or maybe the cleaning crew was just that good. But the point of this exercise wasn’t to cause damage or draw attention. It was to capture fractions of time. Split seconds recorded by my camera.
Even if my stickers were noticed, nobody realized that it was part of a moving picture. That can only happens on the magic pieces of glass that connect us right now. Because we exist outside of space and time, too. Like a hummingbird, I appear for an instant in your inbox and then disappear in a flash, like the flap of a wing.
Here’s the video:
It is less than three minutes long, and I’d love it if you watched it. The algorithm hasn’t blessed this one so your likes and shares could go a long way to encouraging YouTube to show it to more people.
Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade
P.S. You might recognize my hummingbird from other notable films including:
- Saving Images on Cassette Tape
- Toothbrush-Powered Flipbook
- Receipt Animation
- Hand-cranked Shelf Toy