Amusement parks are sprawling places, made of equal parts cotton candy-flavored summer fun and sweat-soaked, grease-coated despair. Artist James Dive of the Glue Society managed to squeeze that all down into one beautiful but horrifying 4m x 4m cube that has all the grease and none of the fun.
Built for Denmark’s Sculpture by the Sea show, the giant cube is called Once and is very literally made from the ground-up, Katamari corpse of a real amusement park. Its guts include everything from twisted metal ride frameworks to chintzy plush prizes, buzzers, bells and tickets.
The construction wasn’t all fun and games though. Speaking to the Creative Review, Dive described the process of creating the cubic behemoth:
“The project is about the finality of a missed moment. Creating [it] was undoubtedly the most violent process I’ve ever embarked upon.”
There definitely is a certain kind of poignant irony there; a once-sprawling world of fun — dissected and mercilessly crammed into a comparatively tiny cube that shares all of the material but none of the functionality. But as a bonus, it also looks awesome.
[Creative Review via Boing Boing]