IMG_0582.JPG IMG_0587.JPG While in New York a few weekends ago I visited the Solar Powered Arts Festival at the encouragement of a local techy and all around good guy Jacob. He and the ever smiling Diana met me at Stuyvesant Cove Park on Sunday afternoon, both of them having used pedal power to get up there from Brooklyn; I took the metro. There was a lot of really cool artisans and builders out. From the friendly woman who paints bicycle portraits to the kooky guy setting alight aluminum and lye (the combination creates hydrogen gas) and giving away plans for sterling engines. A stage was powered entirely by solar panels where local musicians were jamming. Also, the Children’s Zoo had a couple of snakes and monarch butterflies out for people to touch and their keepers, of course, who you couldn’t. I had a good time photographing the two “structures” the organizers had built: the first built out of cardboard tubing, the other a pile of tires. The tubing was a mish mash of concrete-piling-forms connected together with “a couple thousand bolts”; this from the guy further reinforcing it further with nails pounded in by the side of his wrench “to fill time”. It was throwing some crazy shadows. The tires were just a bunch of tires piled up with plants in them; it was a nice juxtaposition of green and black.