lux aeterna from mozart's requiem. for listening only.

lara black:
i came to feel that i really loved this task after reading the completion by you know who. simple as it is, it seemed so elegant and romantic that i felt compelled to sign up immediately. with a swift click, i added it to my list of things to do.

then it sat around in my queue for months.

i discussed different methods of completing it with different players. for a while, 0x40 and i tossed around the idea of using magnetic LEDs to complete the task (and in the time since, i see that clayton has submitted this completion, utilizing the medium to great effect!), and i tried to tempt zemaluco into mentoring me on this one, but i was already past level two and ineligible to collect those points by the time we even started toying with what we might like to do. i knew i wanted lots of candles and i knew i wanted a lake, but i couldn't seem to wrap my mind around how the two should come together. inspiration just wouldn't strike. i needed a muse or a sign or a cause or, preferably, all three.

in the meantime, i recorded audio books, got into accidents, crafted kites, and watched a bunch of those bbc planet earth documentaries (which are so rad, guys). then, a few important things happened.

1. a bit of new life was breathed back into the project, in the form of torsten, who also wanted to collaborate with ze, and seemed to have a little more enthusiastic energy than either myself or ze for actually getting the ball rolling down that particular hill. thank you torsten! you are the allspark!

2. i got back into origami and came up with an excellent idea for conveying candles onto a murky lake, and

3. a revolution broke out and gave us a reason to make the whole thing fucking epic.

the idea for the completion came to me when i was describing my first adulthood full-sized fresh-cut christmas tree to a friend while we were chatting about my recently rekindled origami fascination (i was truly obsessed with it as a child). it was only last year that i took the huge step of obtaining a full-sized live christmas tree for my own home, and in all the excitement surrounding the dragging of an 8-foot evergreen-smelling plant into my home, i got very carried away with the decorating. for each light on the tree, i folded an origami lantern which slid over the bulb, making a tiny colorful lampshade of sorts for the miniature light sources:



there was a lot of additional obsessive compulsive tree dressing, as well as a healthy amount of homemade eggnog and some disastrous pumpkin ice cream/gingersnap parfaits that ended up all over the walls and floor of my kitchen, but that's all beside the point. the lanterns are what got my gears turning.

it occurred to me that lanterns are not the only thing you can make using origami. i thought back, way back, to my childhood and remembered making little paper boats that my mom and i would float on the waters of lake glendale. they had a little sail in the middle, were very cute, and could be made out of standard issue 8.5 x 11 copy paper (or notebook paper in a pinch!) i was quite good at making them as a youngster.



combining these two ideas in my head i came up with the idea of floating the candles out onto the lake in tiny paper boats. the sail in the center of each boat could be depressed to make a perfect, tealight-sized (and shaped) divet.



the walls of the boat would help protect the delicate flame from gusty winds, and the paper would be biodegradable! the whole thing would be very ephemeral, lasting only as long as it took for the boats to become waterlogged and sink.



i conveyed this idea to torsten and zemaluco and the three of us agreed that paper boats were totally awesome and that we should make them do our bidding on the lake. excited, i set about performing various tests, most of which took place in my bathtub, and all of which were met with great success:





i forwarded the results of these tests on to my collaborators, who were most stoked, and we decided to congregate on the afternoon of december the 1st in the year 2007 in order to craft our vessels and then later release them into the wild bearing their luminous cargo.

in the meantime, something quite earth-shattering occurred! a certain player who is known by many names, but is currently calling himself "the revolutionary" declared open war on the university of aesthematics. this was troubling because although both torsten and i (who are u of a members) agreed with the reasons behind this war, we both felt very strongly that this task should be completed with great care for technique, appearance, and production. what to do, what to do...

then a tiny lux went off in my head. what if, in the true spirit of "lux aeterna" (which, if you didn't know, is the name for the communion chant during a requiem mass), we turned our little sailing party into an epic funeral for the u of a? the reference seemed perfect as boats and fire are common themes in the funeral rituals of many cultures. plus, if we framed it this way we could make the event overwhelmingly u of a in it's trajectory as a final homage to what u of a once represented, and still stand behind the revolution by ultimately laying the university's bones to rest in a watery grave.

it was on.

we gathered at my house in oakland on december 1st with stacks of paper, piles of tea lights, a 3/4 of the way empty bag of sunchips, uisge beatha, 2 miller high lifes, and a bottle of chuck. i taught torsten and zemaluco how to fold the boats (they were both incredibly fast learners) and we set to work. it didn't take us as long as you would think to amass a number of boats equal to the number of u of a players on sfzero (i told you this shit was epic).



torsten volunteered to star in this short tutorial on paper boat folding. my cat, jean grey, also made an appearance


a large number of boats stacked neatly on my living room table.

then, in dead of night, we took our little boats down to beautiful lake merritt, the crown jewel of oakland. we ran a few trials, scared a few ducks, and pissed off some night herons before we finally found the perfect spot to release our somber saiboats.


this night heron was not at all happy about our presence and watched us very suspiciously as we attempted to locate the perfect location for the launch.

near the intersection of grand and el embarcadero, there was a construction area that was sectioned off. inside there was a lot of dangerous looking trash and equipment, but most importantly a floating pier that extended outward a little ways into the lake. it would make us very visible (and vulnerable!) to work from this location, but it was clearly perfect (being in a calm part of the lake and shielded by the tarp-covered fences from a good deal of the wind. we ignored the sign which expressly forbade us to climb under the fence (which was quite tricky to navigate, since it extended out from the bank and over the lake by about 5 feet. we all got our feet in the lake water, some of us more than once, and it was commented many times by all that wellies would have made the task a good deal less filthy) and gained entry to this little alcove of doom.


this sign was posted on the construction area, but none of us knows how to read so we don't know what it says. guess we should have brought a member or l.e.w.l. along!

once inside, we carefully mounted the floating pier and began to work. i assembled the candle boats, and ze lit each one and sent them on their way. torsten documented with my camera (in an early tragedy, his (better) camera fell into the brackish water, and we did not think it wise to turn it on again after that).


ze and i hard at work. this artsy fartsy picture was certainly taken in the trajectory of u of a! she would have been proud...

we could not have picked a better spot. immediately the little boats started to float off toward the center of the lake in a line. it was incredibly beautiful and magical, and although i hope that some of these pictures will convey the spirit to all of you, they certainly don't capture even an ounce of what it was like to be there.


torsten captures zm and i hard at work and then shows us the overall effect. listen closely at the end for the sound of my foot splashing into the murky deeps for the second time in the evening. "it's a dangerous spot!"

as a larger and larger number accumulated on the lake, several ducks swam over to investigate. you can't see them in the pictures but they were hanging around with the boats during most of launch. possibly, not knowing our reasons for filling their home with unexpected and wonderful light sources, they believed that we had decorated the lake expressly for them. anyway, they seemed to enjoy it.


this picture comes closest to capturing the scale, but it still really doesn't convey just how many boats we got out there or exactly how magical the whole thing really was.

finally, all of our little boats (and if you know how many u of a members there are, you will realize that there were hundreds) were out on the water and we were able to regard our efforts from the pier. we tried to act somber, but i admit we were all pretty excited by what we had managed to accomplish :)


lara black taking it all in from the pier.

as we were packing up, two dudes climbed into the enclosure (by a much more intuitive route than we had taken in, btw) and asked us what was going on. they had seen the lights on their walk home and wanted to know if we were artists. they got a resounding "no!"

we tried to explain a bit of what we were doing to them, and asked them to take a picture of the three of us holding white candles, representing the light of u of a. we then blew them out, in what would hopefully be a prophetic symbol of the coming downfall of the university.


out, out brief candle.

the two newcomers were suitably impressed with our efforts and said that shots at the ruby room were on them, so we decided to have a little wake.





later we went back to their apartment where we enjoyed a little wine and toasted the new era.





we very much hope that you enjoy our completion of lux aeterna.


debout les damnés de l'université!