A week ago I dropped off a note today to my neighbors to save water bottles for me to pick up. There is a lot to learn about water bottles, and the best way is to get a bunch. I managed to collect about 160 bottles and here are a few lessons learned:

1. When you say you’ll accept a rinsed out non-water bottle, people will ignore you.
2. Not everyone know what it means to keep the cap on.
3. The labels on water bottles are attached with space-age adhesive, that once exposed, adheres to everything, including plastic trash bags, your fingers, and dirt. This adhesive is more tenacious than silicone caulk.
4. Bottles are like people, they come in all shapes and sizes. Smooth, rough, skinny, big, light, heavy, sticky, noisy, empty, and full of it.
5. Leaving bottles in a hot car, then bringing them into a cool space, will cause the bottle to collapse.
6. Taking a bottle from a cool space to bake in the Florida sun will cause it to blow up like a balloon.
7. It is impossible to “dry” the inside of a bottle without considerable effort.
8. If you try to carry more than 10 bottles they will suddenly jump out of your hands and scurry to every corner of the room.

Today I purchased the domain messageinabottlejax.com and started creating the site using WordPress. Initially people will be coming to the site to see what this project is all about. We will be promoting the project and trying to get some support, and the site needs to explain what we are doing, why, and how. It also needs to give some specific instructions to those who have bottles to contribute, and those who want to help.

Another big aspect of the site is to allow our servicemen/women to see our message. In fact, I think this should be the primary purpose. So I’ve arranged to have the word cloud with the portrayal of the words people are writing as the main focal point of the page, and then pictures of the Wall of Light below. Since the wall doesn’t exist yet, we will feature an artist rendering (provided by Robert Leedy) and a mockup. We will also display the number of bottles we have collected so far.

This blog will be an important aspect of the project and hopefully will contain all the latest news about events and our progress.

Did you know there was an online caulk usage calculator?

Each bottle in the wall will have 6 touch points to adjacent bottles (2 top, 2 bottom, 2 sides), so each bottle will have 3 points for caulk application. Assume a ¼” dab per point, which I think is generous. A 10.3 oz tube of caulk with a ¼” bead will cover 24.4 feet (according to the caulk usage calculator).

24.4 x 12 / (3 x .25) = 390 bottles (say 350) per tube

A tube of silicone caulk is about $4.50

For 20,000 bottles, 57 tubes = $256

For 200,000 bottles, 570 tubes = $2,565 (ouch)

This morning I dropped by Lowe’s to pick up caulk (a tube of the cheapest white stuff and a tube of silicone) and a caulk gun. Time to glue some bottles together. Silicone definitely works best. The white stuff is watery and just doesn’t hold, even after drying. The silicone isn’t permanent though. You can still tear it apart. I don’t think there is a solvent available that can glue polyethylene. In fact super glue comes in polyethylene bottles.

Part of my advisory group met today to discuss next steps and the overall deadlines for the project. It was agreed that I needed to be further along on the wall proof of concept and construction details before we announced anything. I think everyone is timid about a potential pile of scrap bottles they would be associated with. Right now I’m trusting my instincts. Not everything can be worked out in detail. We have a LOT of work to do and I came to the conclusion that it is up to me to get this project going. Dorian (my lovely wife) agreed to be the Project Manager, which is a great relief because I know she will get the job done. I will do my best to focus on the structure and overseeing the overall direction.

My next steps are to refine the wall’s design, build the website, and develop strategies for support. If we can tie in some key players early, starting with the Mayor’s office, we can move through the schools, the military bases, and churches. In order to do the initial promotion, the concepts need to be solid.

My other realization is that this project needs to be grass roots, not something promoting a business or particular agenda. True, it is an arts project, but it is more importantly an expression of gratitude to the military, from me and the city. I want there to be no question about this.

What will the wall look like? What shape or form will it take? Will its form be dictated by construction? How will light, both during the day and at night, affect the way the wall looks?

Good questions. The wall needs to represent more than a mass of recycled bottles. It needs to express the messages inside, and communicate the collective voice of everyone who contributed a piece of it. In order to arrive at a design for the wall, I am preparing a scale study model so that I can examine and evaluate different arrangements. To represent a bottle, I will use a plastic drinking straw. I found a case of them at Costco, 3,000 for $12. A typical water bottle is 2.5″ in diameter x 8″. The drinking straws were 3/16″ in diameter, which means they need to be cut into 0.6″ segments to match the proportions of a bottle. I can get 12 segments from each straw, which means I can model 36,000 bottles.

The planter in Main Street Park where the wall will be constructed is 210′ long and 18′ wide. In order to maintain the scale of the bottles to the straws (which is 13.33:1), the planter needs to be 189″ long (that’s 15′-9″) and 17″ wide. Now that’s a big model! I have some cardboard boxes that I rescued from the furniture movers and some foamcore…onwards with the model.

Seth Godin of the Domino Project recently sent out a request to purchase a book End Malaria. It is a book about doing great work PLUS a majority of the proceeds goes to Malaria No More. I received my copy today and found this quote from Michael Stanier, the editor of the book:

“Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly

important and nearly impossible.”

I was encouraged.

Today Dolf and I met with Cabeth Cornelius and Cinda Sherman to review plans for Main Street Park. I wasn’t planning to say anything about Message in a Bottle, but I let it out of the bag. There was a lot of excitement about what the project could do, not only as an art piece but as a way for the community to do something together downtown. There is a unanimous feeling in Jacksonville about the military. We are a military town, and we are proud of it. So it’s time for me to give this some serious consideration, and prepare myself to run with this project.

Anytime we come up with a wild idea we look for confirmation. I wrote up a description so I could pass it around to some close friends. One of my inspirations for recognizing the military is Scott Keffer, a Navy Chief, currently overseas in Italy. He guided me through our other project in 2007-08 called Photographers for Freedom, when Keffer was deployed to Iraq.

I created a description of the project (MessageInABottle PDF) and started thinking about the logistical details. I started feeling nervous when I started calculating what it would take to build a wall in the park. The main planter is 210 ft long by 18 ft wide. A water bottle is 2.5″ x 8″. Thinking that I would stack the bottles like firewood, it would take approximately 30,000 bottles to build a wall 210 ft long x 6 ft high. If we wanted to collect enough bottles to represent every serviceman/woman engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan (200,000), the wall would have 6-7 layers of 30,000 bottles. That’s a big wall and a LOT of bottles.

The logistics of collection, processing, recording, and preparing the bottles for the park is a daunting task. And what of the construction itself? How will the wall be supported, how will the construction be staged, how will the bottles be attached to each other, what kind of lighting would be required?

I wanted to know if the idea had enough merit to warrant further study. Sometime we fall in love with our own ideas, and this one needed some confirmation before I was going to jump in. The initial reaction from people was good, although most quickly realized what a difficult task lay ahead of us, especially if we wanted something in place before the holidays.

Main Street Park is a public park located behind our library and art museum. It usually is a place for the homeless to hang out, and very rarely do we see anyone using the space for anything. During our recent Jazz Festival the park was full and it was clear that the space could be utilized for the enjoyment of the public if there was something interesting there to see. I’ve been working with Dolf James and his Art in Strange Places project for the past year, and he envisioned placing several “pop-up galleries” in the park with contributions from local artists. I volunteered to produce a piece, and we opened the park to the public for August Art Walk to a big crowd of enthusiastic supporters. After the pop-ups we installed my Blu Gras piece in the park which got me to thinking about what was next. The park is a wonderfully designed open space with linear planters and a plaza. It is a perfect venue for installation sculptures and events.

I’ve been recently inspired by artists such as Andy Goldsworth and Maya Lin, whose large scale artworks are able to engage their viewers and present alternate views of common materials. I envisioned a large scale installation in the park, and arrived at using recycled water bottles as a material that was readily and cheaply available, was structural, lightweight, and waterproof, and had properties of translucency. I was excited to do something with this material. My original communication with Dolf about an idea to collect bottles with messages was on 9/10.

The next day I watched the memorials on 9/11. I was inspired to do something that would bring awareness to those who serve our country and thought that the message could be directed to our troops. I knew that this would bring an element of community involvement to the project, and could ultimately be something that could lift the spirits of our troops for the holidays.