See the cool wall back there behind s4 and spacebug? The black edifice I mean. That's a hotel wall covered in plastic. The walls of the Bloomington Sheraton are uglier than seven beige dogs with cancer. They're ugly like the fall of Ilium. They make you want to fail at things that matter to you; make you want to eat your own fingers off. Make you throw up, just a little, in the back of your throat so you feel that weird burning sensation and everything tastes like bile for about an hour. I mean ugly like that wall behind inktea there, dancing in prep for her awesome stage performance where she dominated the mic.
Well every year in July we have to deal with those stinking walls when a bunch of us take a strong role in creating and operating Connie's Space Lounge as part of the CONvergence science fiction and fantasy fandom convention. CONvergence is pretty awesome and draws in a good sized bunch of people. Connie's Space Lounge is especially awesome, wherein a group of dedicated volunteers transforms a shitty hotel conference room into a lounge-a-riffic trip zone for transporting the innocent into alien realms the likes of which they only previously saw on a television in their coolest dreams.

No seriously, Space Lounge is frickin rad.

Anyway, this year, we had done the usual thing (the picture at right is from 06, in fact) where some volunteers spent several hours hanging plastic around the ugly hotel flywalls. Then the morning the convention was scheduled to start, when we no longer had time, energy, or staff to completely overhaul everything, the Bloomington Fire Marshall showed up. The plastic had to go. Period. Non-negotiable. It was legally mandated ugliness.

Shortly after that I felt I had a moment of SF0-inspiration: we don't have time to do it ourselves, why not ask attendees to help make our walls look pretty again? The whole joint is done up with UV lights, why not just make crazy uv-reactive images to cover as much of the walls as we can? Why not invite people to help make it a ...well, a public easel? There's over 2500 people at this con. That gives us some potential; though we're not going to get those walls completely covered. So we set up paper and fluorescent markers around the lounge space. As you can see in one sample pic below, Convergence winds up with tons of signage all over the hotel. The hotel allows paper posters hung with masking tape on their walls. There's nothing that says you can't put a whole bunch of those posters all together. I put together a sign that invited people to come to the Space Lounge to see the public easel. We got one of the emcees at opening ceremonies to announce that "In the interest of safety, we have lowered the walls of Connie's Space Lounge to their default or 'suck' setting. please help us with 'wall 2.0.'" I put up signs in the space lounge as follows:
WALL 2.0
The Public Easel
How to play:
1. The fire marshall said "make the walls suck again". We want YOU to Make the wall awesome!
2. Paint, draw, design, shape, outline ,or just stick up a few blank panels
3. Leave a message or make an artistic statement if you want
4. Don't be afraid! You are cool enough! You CAN'T mess up. It will be awesome if your heart is pure and your aim is true.
5. Check out the results online: sf0.org

The Wall 2.0 thing was just kind of a joke, you know, like the web 2.0 thing? The participatory wall. har har.

But regardless. People started to do it! It started to evolve. Some of the images were very beautiful. Some of the stuff was hilarious. I saw lots of people trying it out. It didn't grow as large as it could have, even after I put up dozens and dozens of blank sheets myself. But it did evolve and grow, and it really invited people to engage and play and enjoy themselves. There were lots of comments and pleasant noises and people of all ages, and non-players participated.

Write up by Burn Unit