Archive for the 'the machine' Category

The Machine - Chris Pfeifle Working the Camera

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

I think that I’m going to start putting up a bunch of the clips that I decide are NOT going into The Machine documentary. There are just too many clips that I like that I have had to pull out, and I still need to cut at least 35 or so minutes.

Here’s one of them:

Division (Burning Man 2007 Proposal)

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

Division is the next project by Stronghold Productions. This is a similar group of people to “The Machine Crew”; who created The Machine for Burning Man 2005. Some familiar faces, some new, all excited to be creating absurdly huge meta-mechanical structures.

A bunch of these are images that I created in various 3d programs, as well as some art, model, and CAD pieces by Tom Hall, buphalo, and Gabe Stern.


golden mean, fractal, and fibonacci imagery & inspiration


3d sketches

20070119 updated 3d (partial)

20070120 Tom Hall sketches


20070120 3d (no wall)


20070120 Tom Hall & buphalo - paintings, drawings & model


20070122 Final Proposal images

The Machine - Time Lapse from Burning Man 2005

Monday, August 29th, 2005

If you asked what I was working on during the past year, I could probably tell you that I was “working on “The Machine”. While this could sound like a vague reference to “the man” or something of the sort, it was actually a huge collaborative project that I was working on with a bunch of people. This was created for the 2005 Burning Man Festival.

We had people from many professions including contracting, art, realty, party and event creation, shmoozing, welding, computer geekery, audio, engineers, graphic design, multimedia, dance, performance, and some architecture background. This huge structure was community created, community run and used during the event, and then community destroyed at the end of the event.

The short description given to the Burning Man event beforehand:

Made primarily of steel and wooden parts, The Machine (Mach12e) expresses an elusiveness of time and place. Burning Man participants will at first have the opportunity to view the sculpture, a triangulated meta-mechanical temple, in the open vista of the playa. They will explore its isolation, both spatial and emotional. Three elevated drive wheels and housings, a raised rotating central core comprised of a tower of gears and a transmission, and an upper platform that suspends eight articulated kinetic limbs define its multifaceted rust, blue, and gray form.

(wood, steel, nails, screws, cable, gears, rubber belts, hard rubber casters, soft rubber tensioner wheels, belt tensioner/belt rider system to cut down on the belt harmonics caused by the wind, 8 channel audio, olfactory)