GOATs

Role: concept, project management, maze/build design, budget, informational signage, pipes wall installation, smell boxes/compost exploration, paintings

GOATs (Goats Organizing Abhorrent Trashes) is a fire-marshal-approved (!) navigable maze in a room, themed around goats that consume organic waste and "process" it into compost. In every corner and dead end of the space, explorers find interactive experiences about goats, trash, compost, and their sense of smell. The absurdist concept of composting goats operating/working/living in a maze is a useful tool to guide participants in questioning their own relationship to waste. 

When building an indoor installation, many new things must be considered that one can conveniently ignore with outdoor installations, notably: fire safety. With an eye toward this, in addition to ease of build and reducing participant claustrophobia, our team devised a fire plan to allow safe egress and clear signage while maintaining a sense of confusion appropriate to a maze and using fire-safe materials. We settled on a light wooden superstructure, from which we suspended welded fire fencing panels treated with fluorescent paints to glow subtly in an environment lit with 385nm black lights. Fluorescent tape on the artificial turf flooring marked exit pathways, and fence panels were hung at a height that would provide sufficient disorientation at eye level, yet easy egress via crawling at the floor.

Two ominous-looking goat-themed religious paintings welcome participants to the room, where they first encounter a wall of fanciful plumbing piping, suggesting the "utility room" nature of the space. As participants explore the space, they encounter opportunities to listen to an audio introduction to the goats' lore, play goat games, climb on rocks, and smell unusual organic trash, before finding a larger-than-life goat sculpture (feed it trash, watch it dispense cocoa puff cereal from its rear end) anchoring the maze before exiting into an adjoining room. 

In addition to overall design/build/safety planning, I developed the concept for the wall of pipes, designed/built custom nesting sealed glowing boxes containing pungent smells (like durian), coordinated the rock climbing experience with several collaborators, and constructed my first iteration of the installation that became Worms!