8' Nose Hanging on Physics Building

​ "We are meeting at midnight in Noga's room.
​Bring two blades of grass."
​

   On October 20, I was added to a group conversation that started with these two lines. The messages that followed entailed more ambiguous talk of blades of grass, tin foil hats, chicken wire, and sea serpents. I wasn't sure. Noga's room was two miles away from my apartment and I had an 8:00 class the next morning. I didn't go that night.

  The next night, another midnight meeting was held. This time I did go. I was roped in. Basically, we were forming some sort of rogue guerilla street art group known as Eldritch Esbat. We wanted to do something, to make something happen, but none of us knew quite what. We liked the idea of hanging some sort of sculpture on a building for the public to see. We bounced many ideas that night, and eventually decided on nose.

​The Build

   To start off the project, I found a nose model in Sketchup's 3D warehouse, stretched and shrunk different parts of it to get proportions that I wanted, and finally scaled the entire thing to 8' tall. Then, I made cross sections and designed the skeletal structure.

​   After getting materials, we projected those cross sections onto three 4x8' sheets of plywood, traced the outlines of each cross section, cut them out, and assembled the skeletal structure.

​   Next, the entire thing, except for the back, was wrapped in chicken wire. Getting the mesh to properly wrap around the form of the nose, and especially getting it to form correctly into the contours of the nostrils, was definitely the most challenging part of the entire process.

​   With the form made, the next step was paper mache. We used rolls of brown paper and wallpaper paste. It was difficult to make it stick to the limited surface area of the chicken wire mesh, especially on the upside-down faces of the nostril, but once we had the first layer on, it was easy to stack it up. We did around 4-5 layers, and probably should have done more. I wanted to do more, but I think everyone wanted too much to move forward. It still came out fine, just maybe a bit fragile.

 
    After the top surfaces of the nose were done, we flipped it over to get around the edges.

   Then paint.

   At this point it's looking really good. It could have gone up, but I think we all got busy with things and left the nose for a few weeks.

   In that time, it got rained on a few times and ended up getting a few gashes in the nostril. The tears relieved tension that the paper mache had built up while it was drying, which left the left nostril looking slightly deflated. The gashes were easily repaired and repainted. We touched up the paint on the rest of the nose as well.

​Deployment

   We deployed November 18 from around 1:00 - 2:30 AM. It was not supposed to take that long.
​

   Before deployment, two of us went out to the location with the 1/16" steel rope we would use to support the nose. The goal was to find the anchor point, which was a leg that supported a massive air conditioning unit, then span the cable out from that point to the edge where the nose would hang. Knowing how high we wanted the nose to hang, we clamped the cable thimble at the appropriate point such that the nose would hang as we wanted. This way, we wouldn't have struggle with setting the cable length during the stress of the hang itself. It should have made the entire thing a swift matter of hauling up the nose from the ground and tying it off.

   That's not quite what happened, though. The thin cable was too difficult to grab firmly, the rocks on the roof made it hard to get foot traction, and the friction of the steel cable against the concrete corner of the roof all made it impossible to get the ~60-80 lb nose anywhere off the ground. I later found out that we actually ended up carving a groove in the concrete edge trying to do this.  All of our work was going into cutting a groove, not pulling up a nose.

   A new plan was in order. Two of us drove to my apartment and I gathered some thicker climbing rope that we could get a good grip on, some carabiners, and some gloves for extra grip.  I also got a pizza box, and I quickly cut out a rough plastic rectangle out of the outside face of a milk jug.

   We dropped the new rope down from the roof and people on the ground clipped it in. The pizza box and milk jug were for the corner problem. The pizza box was draped over the corner, and the milk jug placed over that. This worked brilliantly. The jug took out all the friction and held in place well. One of us attended it anyway just in case it slipped while pulling the rope. Another three of us were easily able to hoist the nose up. After that, it took just a bit of cable fiddling to transfer the weight to the steel cable and remove the pizza box and milk jug, and it was done

​Reception

   The nose was still there at least least as late as 9:30 AM, and was removed sometime before 11:00 AM. Few passing students in the densely trafficked area looked up, but chuckles and confusion could be seen on the few faces of those who did.