Introduction: Guerrilla Triangle

By Lafe
About: I'm an applied physicist by training(phd Yale 2006, BA Berkeley 1998, math and physics), and have done physics research in the federal government and product development in the private sector, starting two of …

This by itself is a fairly obscure art project. It is intended to be part of a much larger network of things I'm documenting on here. What I'm doing here is duplicating the shape I call TriangleC1 into a soft bit of brick found in a riverbed using simple hand tools.

The tools needed for this are:

Step 1: Go Find Old Bricks in Water

I want the bricks that have been flooded many times for many decades. Most cities in the world have these. They are the bones of the dead giants of industries past. Wander along a creek, river, lake, cove, spit, beach harbor or slough until you see some busted up combination of bricks and rocks. Go find a couple very heavily weathered bricks. I seek this kind because it is so easy to work and re-work.

Step 2: Find a Workspace

The middle of the creek might not be the best place to work for many reasons, it's best to get out of the wind and sun, and find a location you can easily re-find later but that won't get constantly disturbed by foot traffic.

Step 3: Trace Triangle

Find the flattest surface you can on the brick, and trace the triangle.

Step 4: Carve Out Triangle!

This is where the action is! I use a hammer chisel combination to rough out the edges because I find it easier to follow the straight line that way, but then I do most of the carving by hand with the chisel without the hammer. That's why I'm into these old soft bricks instead of new ones, they are WAY easier to carve and don't need so much work. One of the goals of my motor project, the beginning of which I document in Platform 45, Trash Coil Driver, Trash Coil and op amps without circuit boards , is to automate the process of these geometric carvings into brick, so having it be soft enough that a light impact with a steel tool repeatedly can make arbitrary shapes is very useful.

Step 5: Record Location, Pass Along Information.

13th and the South Platte river is the main intersection here and if you look upstream from the bridge you see the view shown above, and based on the tag there and the other images you could locate the triangle I built and some blank bricks which are still waiting for more geometric processing. I have neither removed nor added anything from the river here, just imposed some geometry on a thing and left it there.