I am in awe.
On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football game. Just after Harvard's second touchdown against Yale, in the first quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the 40-yard line, and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The letters ‘MIT’ appeared all over the ball. As the players and officials stood around gawking, the ball grew to six feet in diameter and then burst with a bang and a cloud of white smoke.
The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT's Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a weather balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it out of the ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it. They made eight separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1 and 5 AM, locating an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium and running buried wires from the stadium circuit to the 40-yard line, where they buried the balloon device. When the time came to activate the device, two fraternity members had merely to flip a circuit breaker and push a plug into an outlet.
“I am in awe.”
I was a student at UBC from ‘62-’66. The great Sculpture caper referred to in this article was September ‘63, IIRC.
As a second year student, I was friends with several ‘active’ engineering undergrads at the time - my room-mate and others from residence.
The chicken-wire and cement ‘sculptures’ were produced in late August and placed in various spots on campus - they were sort of formless Moorean shapes with holes and knobs and such. After a week of campus controversy in September engendered by engineering students published complaints about the ugliness of modern art, red-jacketed louts armed with sledge-hammers smashed them all to bits one sunny lunch-hour.
The downtown press went crazy over these savage barbarians - their were booming editorials in Sun and Province denouncing and bemoaning the collapse of civilization.
On campus, the lefty artistic crowd were openly weeping. This went on for two days as I recall. Then the engineers revealed their spoof and challenged the Establishment to justify their taste, or lack of, in art.
Lots of laughs!
It was a good time to be 18 years old. ;^)
Holy cat. I wish I had a hat on. I’d take it off to them.