Welcome to Jersey, a beautiful land… park? Well, it was beautiful, although upon my first encounter: rainy, cloudy and cold. Especially the subsequent day once it was freezing cold and windy and constructing everything was taking long. So long. So did the deconstruction. But constructing it was much more of an effort than expected.

Fingernails busted, totally unprepared, late-nights at the school to finish wrapping up semester loose ends. Eventually leading up to a very windy and a cold day on which we had quite some fun constructing the dome once again. Think about it, if the wind blows and you’re constructing a dome that is lightweight, is made of wood and material that just carries wind, then it’s a bit of a problem isn’t it? With us repositioning the dome and trying to keep it steady in so many ways with sandbags, bags and other provisional material, it all came down to a satisfactory finish as it was raised and ready to go. I thought it would be a bit warmer within the dome at first but the wind was so strong that I really got stone cold and tired to the point I just took a sit and… fell asleep for a while.

In any case, eventually we managed to set up the projector and calibrate all to work properly. It took longer than expected to get it all up and running and so by noon, we decided to get it going, as the projection spanned across most of the Dome and the calibration seemed to have reached its limits, especially that incoming and exterior light remained an issue we had to combat in a variety of ways.

Oh, also I forgot to mention, we had bagels and coffee. Although I had donuts on my way to the spot.

Once it was all dun, I figured my watch has ended and so I decided to check on other tents and pass on the torch of other group members handling the operation. While it could feel a bit strange to do this way, I could just not simply remain in the same spot as I was reaaally cold. So I visited a few other tents, managed to eat some protein bars and pretty good tacos and then I realised that our dome was generating traffic. And that was a good sign. One that would remain as such up till the closing hours around 3, when our team kept on saying that we’re wrapping up but 10 more sessions took place as people just wanted to see it. Considering the mapping was for about 3 minutes and the tent would take about 10 people in-n-out, I would say about 500 people might have come across the projection mapping.

At a later stage I would inspect the dome and it look relatively good, the problem was the projection being skewed but the main components worked and made people in awe. I guess that’s the most satisfying part of all the work done in past weeks.