OK, well the idea is to go to Glastonbury 2010 and build C-3-60 during the festival. But why Glastonbury?
Well, there are a number of reasons. C-3-60 (pronounced see-three-sixty, ideally written C-cubed-60 but I haven't worked out how to get this wiki to allow superscripts yet!) is a piece of Art which encapsulates a lot of scientific principles. It's based on C60, one of the three forms that Carbon naturally occurs in. In order to get it to work we need to do quite a bit of Engineering to be sure of the best way to build it and make it safe.
I want to take it to the Green Futures field because C60 has inspired, and is inspiring, a lot of innovative science. So I think it would be great to get scientists to talk about what they are doing. At the same time Green Futures isn't a passive environment. The people who opt to camp there have strong feelings about science and ow it should be used to enable green solutions to the worlds problems. I'd like to give them an opportunity to voice their opinions to practising scientists. So I feel that the Green Futures field is an ideal venue for this project.
On another level, I have been thinking for a long time about how to get science 'into' the festival setting. I'm aware that others have gone to festivals over the years and, I don't want to denigrate their efforts, but I've not been overly impressed by the results. Most people seem to have gone down the route of Science busking and Science talk tents. Science busking is great as far as it goes. The public really enjoy it and it certainly adds to the festival experience but I'm not sure how many take away the science element of it. Talks in a tent are, I feel, a poor way to go (forgive me) You are up against the real reason why people are there - to see headline acts. You are up against the time constraints of a festival, people have a place and time to be there. If the schedule of your talk/show doesn't match you've lost them. Furthermore, a small white tent in the middle of the day is not the most controllable venue for impressive demos or powerpoint (if powerpoint can ever be impressive) And, finally, both formats suffer from visibility. A busker is seen by the people who happen to be passing, notice them and have the time to stop. Talk in a tent have a tendancy to be pretty invisible as well.
So, I sort of started with the idea that a science event needed to be attention grabbing and I think a 7 metre dome made out of 200,000 ping-pong balls fits the bill. You'd see it from 100 metres away and I think 99% of people would ask "what's that all about" and come to find out. Then they can give the time they want. If it's a structure under construction, there's the added incentive to come back and see what it's like 24 hours later. The current idea is to have scientists 'on hand' to talk about their work (at the moment I envisage the scientists wearing tabards to show that they're 'official' - I even think they should be colour coded by discipline, e.g. if it's in a blue tabard it's a chemist) so that people can spend as long as they want at the project.
Building a structure out of 200,000 ping-pong balls is never going to be a small project, hence I think it needs a big venue and what's bigger than Glasto? The budget appears to be around 45k, so it needs a venue to justify it. Also, because I think that C-3-60 is such a visual thing the fact that there's a lot of publicity around Glasto works in its favour. Someone advised me that a project like this benefits from having a punchline, i.e. a well defined point at which it is completed and 'something happens'. At the moemtn, I would like to spend the first 3 days or so of the festival constructing it, with a view to launching it at, say, 10pm on the Saturday night. I have a professional lighting engineer who has said he would like to come along and light it, I have also spoken with a musician, who has played at Glastonbury in the past, who has expressed an interest in coming along to do the sound show. This could be a highly visual climax to the project and could get a serious amount of publicity if we do it right.
I have, today, managed to get in contact with the person responsible for the Green Futures field and the first response was very positive. There are still issues to be resolved, like persuading them that we're competent to get this thing built, but they would like it to work. I need to follow up my contact and sort out what needs to be done to make it work in everybody's interests.