Wandering Hands Piano Bar

The Wandering Hands Piano Bar is a roving orchestra Burning Man art project consisting of a musician bench wound around a fully functional (via electronic keyboards) giant piano. We roam the Playa in search of musical, artistic, vocal, and spoken word collaborators and create dynamic, collaborative compositions. We will record some of these collaborations, and give out mixed CDs on the Playa on Sunday or via our website after the festival.

True to its name, the Wandering Hands Piano Bar is also a bar, so we invite those who would like to sit back and listen to the music to climb inside the piano into the central seating area and enjoy a fine concoction from our bartender.

Some of our photo galleries:

Anna: http://www.flickr.com/photos/62303011@N00/sets/72157624211701547/

Fred: http://fsayre.smugmug.com/Arts-and-Crafts/Art-Car/12476012_orjaH#893980944_6dc6r-A-LB

David: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9100973@N06/sets/72157624123913964/

Possu: http://picasaweb.google.com/possutonium/ArtCar#

See below for a pictorial evolution of our project:

Our new ford truck! 5/20/10

Cad version

Full color concept drawing

The bar pit

The lid skeleton. It's bigger than our house!

The left side skeleton

Some of the team

Planning

The right side skeleton

Working on hinging the lid

Constructing the front

The framed truck. (It's been framed, I swear!) 6/20/10

The hinged lid

Installing the sliding back window ($20 on Craigslist from the home shop of an awesome guy named Mike Rowand!)

The first successful egress

Carrying the lid to the piano

Midday Saturday June 26th

Possu and Yakov graduate to building the back piano platform (the yellow paper is the plan for the platform)

Installing the back platform

Skinning the piano

End of Sat, July 3rd

Bonding with our squash overlords

Primer layer # 1 (out of 3 + several paint layers)

Our ridiculously over-engineered hatches

Building the back of the right side

Sewing the wild shade cloth

Stretching the shade cloth (as with many delicate operations, this is best done at night with no light and with many obstacles scattered all over...)

The chandelier starts to shimmer into existence

Possu's design for keyboard mount

Mounting the lid. Part 1: The Hogtie

Mounting the lid. Part 2: Riding the Bomb

Mounting the lid. Part 3: The Lift

Do you see the truck?! An exercise in prototyping...

Welding the exhaust

The completed chandelier

At the end of the day... stringing the wire

Piano front pieces

The elusive green piano (and its purple painters)

The black piano spreads its wings

Routing the piano case sides

Lid... check! Keyboards... check!

The balcony scene

My knees fit under the piano!

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The party celebrating the completion of the art car (in reality the art car is about 88% complete at this point) - 8/21/10

The left platform Hora

Last-minute electronics on the nose

Packing

Always the helpful co-pilot

Piano at the gates of dawn

Unpacking

Ra

Raising the lid

Latching the lid: a study in blue sky.

Black Piano at Night

Black Piano at Night (again)

We're off to see the wizard! (at the DMV)

Licensed to play

Lounging in the piano

Sake might keep me from being as much of a safety nazi, but it won't stop me from making faces

The piano also makes a quality refuge from dust storms

Black Piano at Sunrise

The dancer in the dance

These guys were our neighbors. Some typical serendipity.

Possutonium, the caped violinist

The Swedes and I, or rather Possu

Lights!

The burn from the piano

Piano at sunset

Homeward bound