So last weekend I ended up going to the Coachella Music Festival, it was great. I was with the group Robochrist which is run by Christian Ristow. He makes huge robots and does performance art with them. He does events around LA and festivals like Coachella and Burning Man and such. I met Christian at my friend Chris's birthday party a couple months ago. Chris has helped out on a few of Christian's shows, and he told me about them and it sounded like something I'd really like to be a part of, so I asked Christian if I could come with them to Coachella, and after a few weeks of following up on it said yes.

Here are my pictures from the weekend. Also, I ended up finding a few memory cards from someone's digital camera...so here are their pictures. Also, Tackett took pictures and made an online gallery, you can see his pictures here.

So I was there to basically videotape the event. I really tried to help out as much as I could but unfortunately you either videotape, or work. It's hard to do both at once.

So I showed up on Thursday for the packing of the truck. That took a while and we just barely got everything in. I ended up riding in the RV which was really nice because there was lots of room to move around in it. Also, you can legally drink in a RV so it was pretty fun. I ended up getting the nickname Ritalin boy because I moved around in the RV so much. It the RV was Josh who was driving, Porn (that's his name), and me. We show up on Thursday night and we weren't able to unload the truck in the proper area because security wouldn't let us in. So that night we ended up taking the water cannon we have and loading it up with propane and shooting huge propane fireballs into the air. Then we just started loading anything into the cannon....it's amazingly fun to launch trash into the air.

So on Friday we unpacked the truck, setup for a while and then had a pool party. Usually I'm not big for pool parties, but it was really hot out that day and it was really really nice to go swimming. And the guy who owns the house was really nice and he fed us really well. We had a great time.

The next day was the first day of the Coachella festival. We finished setting up the robots and props and stuff and did the show. The show was called You Are What I Eat, and it's about how humans consume all these things that are bad for us, so in addition to the robots we had huge mockup props of soda, cigarettes, all the good vices. Here's a good picture of the setup.

The show went really well. We didn't plan on destroying too much since there was going to be a show the next day, so Saturday was sort of planned to be a rehearsal, but it was still really cool. We accidentally started a fire in a cooler which the fire department got angry about so we had to promise to turn down the fire for the next days show.

The machines we had there were really amazing. Huge robots with flame throwers...and besides that we had a jet engine that had alcohol pumped into it that it shoots out which make a huge 15-20 flame coming out of it. We has had a bunch of propane cannons around and a flame sculpture. So after the show I went around the festival, listening to music and just having a good time. I got to see Kraftwerk. They were cool, they just stood infront of their computers and barely did anything. I really could not tell if they were doing anything at all actually. There was of course really cool computer video stuff being shown on a screen behind them. For their 2nd to last song they left the stage and were replaced by androids, and for the last song they put on outfits that looked like the outfits from Tron.

The next day we cleaned up from the previous show and set up for the real one. This time we would be able to destroy (but not burn) all the props. We could use the flame throwers, but not to set anything on fire. We did the show and it went really well. Everyone loved it, and then a few hours after that they did a 2nd show just because they were just sort of bored and they wanted to finish destroying everything.

The 2nd show that night ended up being the best. They just really destroyed everything and there wasn't any chorography so it was really just a lot of fun, basically the guys just playing with huge RC robots. The crowd watching got really into it. When it started Chris and I were actually away eating dinner and when we were walking back we noticed a huge crowd around our area, we had no idea it was going on.

This whole group was just really amazing. All of them are really smart people who are great at building things, and they also just all really love building stuff, destroying stuff, and building things to help them to destroy stuff.

I got to see some of the concerts. Radiohead was really good. When The Flaming Lips came on stage the lead singer walked over the audience in a huge inflatable ball. For the last song he had a punching nun puppet on his hand which he had sing to the audience.

So it was a pretty great weekend. I ended up only getting a little bit sunburnt, and I burnt my arm just a bit on the muffler of a robot. I'm going to be going to Burning Man with the group this year it looks like which I really can't wait to do. I've been wanting to go to that for a while now.