Project:AGUK Trophy

Overview

Air Guitar UK (site / facebook) run the annual competition to find the greatest air guitarist in the country and send them to the World Air Guitar Championships in Oulu, Finland.

I started running AGUK this year as the Artistic Director, and I wanted to make a bit more out of the trophy we give to the Champion (usually a handsome lump of perspex with the logo on). So I approached the Design Museum with the idea to hold an open competition to design it, and they loved the idea.

The winner of the competition (to be judged by a Chris from Hackspace, myself, and hopefully a designer, a musician, and someone connected with Teenage Cancer Trust, who we promote) will be announced at an Air Guitar UK 'takeover' of the Design Museum's Riverside Hall) at 1pm on Friday the 20th of July.

That evening the space will become the venue for the Air Guitar UK Championship Finals, where the best air guitarist in the country will be crowned and presented with the trophy, and then sent to represent the UK at the World Air Guitar Championships on the 22-24th of August.

The Project

Now we've got the Design Museum on board help find a design, we need someone to build it, and I've been a member of Hackspace for a while, so I thought who better to ask? We're looking for a team of volunteers from the Hackspace to build the winning design (anyone here is free to enter the competition itself too, of course!).

Draft creative brief

The air guitarist conjures something from nothing, carves solidity from unsolidity, forcefully projecting pure will in to the real world.

In yielding to that instinctive urge to embody the music, mirror-neurons firing in urgent sympathy with imagined twitching fingers finally find purchase in the motor cortex, and magic happens. Spectacular magic.

When an air guitarist believes they’re playing a guitar, they make the audience believe it too. It's a powerful art form: part dance, part mime, all absurdity.

The Air Guitar UK Championships trophy needs to represent all this, somehow. Fit to stand as testament that the bearer is the greatest air guitarists in the land, it must be a brandish-able object you can hold aloft, free-standing when displayed, and convey the information: "Air Guitar UK Champion 2012". Creatively, those are your only limitations.

Draft practical brief

The estimated build-cost of the trophy will have to be less than AMOUNT TO BE SET, and constructable in the Hackspace workshop TOOLS AND MATERIALS TO BE DISCUSSED, unless the designer is able to meet the costs themselves, or if particularly specialist techniques or materials are required, to build it themselves. This keeps the competition open to anyone from an commercial design team to an independent amateur.

Draft time frame

• The deadline for submissions will be Friday the 22nd of June.
• If you win and your design requires that you fund and/or build the trophy yourself, you will be notified by Monday 2nd of July.
• If you win and the Hackspace team will be building the trophy, you will be notified by Friday the 13th of July.
• The winning trophy will be announced and unveiled at the Air Guitar UK 'takeover' of the Design Museum on Friday the 20th of July at 1pm, and then presented to the Air Guitar UK Champion at the climax of the Championships that night.

Team members

Want to get involved and join the join the team? Put your name down here:

User:DMRobertson

Similar Projects

http://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/Project:Hackspace_Challenges