one cityscope ready for action!

After busy 3 hours my cityscope is now completed - dear thanks to Taik metal & glass workshops for helping me out & letting me use their premises! I'm pretty pleased with what I've got. The view could be bigger but the thing looks quite like I imagined it and I think it will demonstrate my idea well. I'll attach the thing tomorrow on my way to Sörnäinen.

The overall project budget was 6 euros, with 5 euros spent on a rectangular metal tube measuring some 6x15x200 cm. A piece of bathroom mirror that luckily readily was 15 cm wide cost me one euro. I've got an old bicycle tube at home that I'm going to use to soften the rims of the cityscope a bit. All material was bought from the Recycling centre at Kyläsaari. I'll probably use a chain to mount the work to the railing, and lock it, too, but hope to get these back when I remove the work or what's left of it on sunday.

One thing that has bothered me a bit is a permit for the work. I still don't have one. In the beginning I saw it impossible to get one from the city in just 5 days, and as it took a day still to decide on the site for the work, I decided to ask for an oral permission on the last minute if I had time - I didn't. This is actually bothering me for two reasons; First, I think the procedure of getting funding and permits needed is an essential part of making public art, and a thing I want to learn to master. Therefore, I usually try to go on with my works trough the official way, even if it meant that the pieces never materialise - in that case I just take it as a learning experince on how the society works in this respect. This time time was just too short for this, as I didn't know that the permits were not arranged for us beforehand. The other thing is, that I'm growing keen on my cityscope, and wouldn't actually want to loose it anymore, at least not in a way that the city parks department would collect it away as trash. As a public piece I can't help it if it gets vandalised, but I'd hope it would stay in its place over the weekend. I have to sleep on this - perhaps I try and ask for a permission truly on the last minute, tomorrow morning.

It'll be interesting to see tomorrow what the others have come up with. Designing the work by blogging was an interesting experience enough, but I think I'll continue this process face-to-face from now on, with hopefully nothing but good to say about the likely very different approaches by people on this theme:)