Fable Bound

A twenty-foot hull that pitched on pneumatics, sequenced by MIDI from a live Ableton set.

Role: Lead artist — design, fabrication, control systems, fundraising, and crew
Years: 2023-11 — 2025-01
Where: Black Rock City
Disciplines: Fabrication · Embedded · Show control · Organizing
Grant: Burning Man Honoraria
Crew: Core of 16. ~60 volunteers over 11 months
Shown: Burning Man 2024, Denver decompressions, Apogaea, Rumpus in the Park

The finished viking ship at dusk on the playa, shields glowing warm from within and blue light washing the painted wave skirts at its base — Black Rock City, August 2024. The shields lit from inside; the sea lit from below.

Requirement

The ship had to move on demand, in time with music, with people standing on it, for a week in the desert. That set most of the architecture. The movement needed enough force to lift a loaded hull, a slow enough travel to be safe with people aboard, and control that could be handed to whoever was running the music rather than to an operator with a switch.

Movement

Four shop air jacks are installed under the hull, the type used for lifting trucks. Each is rated at 3,500 lb, giving roughly fourteen inches of vertical travel at the bow. Air is valved by twelve, 12V solenoids driven through relays. A primary air ballast fills four secondary ballasts with solenoid controls for filling and venting. All the hardware is driven from a custom circuit board Nathan Koral built for the project.

The lit ship at night with people aboard, a burst of flame above the deck

Control

Firmware on the board handles three relay functions and holds the safety interlocks. Fill and exhaust do what they say. The third drives a secondary ballast reserve, which keeps air available between cycles so a movement never has to wait on the compressor catching up.

Above that, a Mac mini runs a Node application that receives MIDI. Each note maps to a movement program. Sequencing the ship from the same Ableton session that played the music meant the person running sound was also running the ship, and neither side needed to understand the other.

Safety

The piece was built for Burning Man, where the "Safety Third" is the standard but catching participants in the pinch points or under the ship was a concern. Pinch points were made physically unreachable rather than signposted, and the stairs and deck were built so that climbing aboard felt adventurous without offering anyone a way to get it wrong. It has not been installed in a non-Burning Man public context, which would need constant on-site oversight.

Field failure

The compressor charging the pneumatic system failed on the third day and could not be replaced on playa. Lighting and sound ran for the full week; the movement did not. The system itself was sound — the failure was in the supply feeding it. It was a straightforward repair once we were home, and the ship has run at two decompression events since.

Crew

Eleven months of build days, and about half the crew found the project through the Burning Man artist posting rather than through anyone on it. My primaryjob was to keep the build moving, and to keep the crew happy. I did that by making sure everyone had a role that suited their skills and interests, and by fostering a collaborative environment where ideas could flourish. Much of the aesthetic and narrative was developed by the crew, and I made sure to credit them for their contributions. The project was a success because of the dedication and creativity of everyone involved.