June 5, 2008
COSMOS may be in a movie.

Disney Pictures is renting COSMOS for a sci-fi thriller called "The Surrogates." It stars Bruce Willis and is expected to be released sometime late in 2009. I shipped it off on Monday packed in six crates plus four loose pieces. Assembling COSMOS is fairly complex and I can't be there to help set it up so I made a 15-page COSMOS assembly manual and shot a 5-minute video of how to put it together.

The movie started filming in February, I think. The part that my sculpture will be in is being filmed on the grounds of an abandoned school in Massachusetts. They expect to rent COSMOS for about three weeks

Cosmos is my largest wind sculpture yet. It is 20 feet tall and 12-feet in diameter at the base. It has four counter-rotating elements with four wind catchers each. There are also four smaller wind spinners in the legs. There is an 8-foot diameter ring with all the signs of the zodiac in it. I built it in 2004 and first displayed it at Burning Man that same year. At that time, most of the wind catchers were covered with brightly colored Spandex. The Spandex deteriorated within a year so I recently replaced all the fabric with sheet metal. I got it done just barely in time before I had to send it off to be in the movie.