top of page

Mustache to Cloud

Kinetic Sculpture

Movement: Detroit Electronic Music Festival, 2012

The Mustache to Cloud project proposes a series of playful sculptural icons (3 total) that serve as
identifiable rendezvous points, photo opportunities, and untimely provide and interface for festival
attendees to participate, with minimal effort, in a lager artistic exercise of frivolous connectivity.


The form and functionality of the project capitalizes upon festival attendees’ existing normative behaviors. First, the installation answers the near ubiquitous festival want for unique identifiable points within the grounds (vis-à-vis, “We’ll
meet back up at that mustache installation at noon”). As identified in the illustrations on the following pages, the elaborate armatures of these pieces may serve as congregation points to that end. The subject matter of the icons (suspended oversized mustaches, of course) capitalizes upon a second activity common to the MOVEMENT experience: The seeking of opportunities for playful candid photographs. These installations provide that opportunity, riding on the coattails of the popular ‘mustache on a stick’ phenomenon. Finally, we press this documentation opportunity further by integrating a simple process to upload the candid photo to the cloud. In this sense, we take advantage of a third condition- utilizing festival attendees’ own technologies- Smart Phones- to enhance the physical installation. The photos of one’s friends at the installation may be uploaded (via QR scanner codes on the sculpture itself) to a simple website of our design exhibiting an interactive map of interconnected moustache installation candids. In this, an individual’s interaction with the sculpture may exist beyond the event, both temporally and physically.

Exhibited at Movement 2012.

Currently in Corktown Studio Sculpture Garden

© 2022 Jake Chidester

bottom of page