Build Day: Making Art for Napa Lighted Arts Part 5

February 10, 2026 Doctor Cosmos

For part 5, the final entry in our Making Art for Napa Lighted Arts we’re going to share the build process with you. There’s also the tear down process which is just as much work but ah, you can kind of just play this story in reverse so this is indeed the final entry for this blog series. Thanks for participating in this blog series and our art, its been a wonderful journey.

Other parts to this series

The Build

You’ve spent 6 months making art. Well, improving art? Making art better? Semantics. The art is “done” (art is never done, but sometimes you are) and the time has come. The build; when you carnie-up (my term), head to the installation site, and setup your art. This is a big day indeed. The build is requires a completely different skillset than being an artist as well as some coordination.

If you know you know, but let me try to briefly in a tl;dr way impart some of what needs to go into a build for the PF3000 in downtown Napa. This is a coordinated effort between both our team, Filma Art Collective and the City of Napa, mostly via the parks district. We have to provide and setup the art. The city has to make sure we have what we need, little things like parking, power and water. This all has to be done within specific and agreed to time constraints and done well enough to make any city employee feel comfortable with the art that has been temporarily joined to the community.

If I had to guess a good 10(ish) people were involved just on setup day, not including additional folks who helps with planning on the cities side before hand. This is a lot of coordination and required everyone to do their part on time and to completion; I’m pretty impressed at how well everything went. Our team consisted of 5 people; both the artists and our friend Hammers who’s an installation expert. Then from the city we have a few folks from parks and rec, folks that blocked off the parking for us, a city electrician, and the water truck.

Notes on Building the PF3000

You might be wondering why so many people from our side? It has to do with size/weight and general awkwardness of moving things around. In order to meet our time constraints we pre-built the PF3000’s display (you can read more about the display earlier in this series). This saves us a few hours on build day but generates a 6’x6′ 150+lb object; so it is heavy and it is really big. To complicate things, we have to use special supports when moving the display or it’ll deform every so slightly and this deformity will hurt the waterproofing work we’ve done.

Thinking about what we need to do the installation with this reality in mind we can think about who we need to do the install. This may or may not be the artists, installing art is kind of a different problem. While creating the art we as artist were focused on design. For installation we have a new challenges which include: the PF3000 is big, its heavy, and its complicated. How do we transport the PF3000 and get it to the build site without messing things up? Simple: We need folks who understand how to move complicated things. We need some folks who can help with heavy lifting.

I’d say when it comes to this skillset in particular, we do have a guy on the team who’s got deeper skills here and that’s Bill, our structural engineer; he can set the PF3000 up with some help in a few hours if he needs to. For doing a build on Napa’s time constraints we needed to move faster. We were engaging with some city employees who stop working at 3pm. We needed specialist help, someone who could easily take on installation challenges. And so we brought in our friend Hammers who can move and build just about anything. With him helping, and most of the art team available to be raw muscle that gave us enough folks to get the build done on time to meet those city employees. It takes a village.

The Build

We’ve been though a long journey together me and you. And now we’re at the end, well sort of not really. We’re at the build which is the beginning of the end? That’s a weird thing to say given there’s still a whole festival happening. Maybe its more like a significant transition than any kind of end though certainly for us and the creation of the PF3000 version 2, there is an end. And I suppose a new beginning all the same. Words are hard.

The stakes are high too; we’re hovering at a climactic moment. Everything is on the line as the build is the highest risk day the PF3000 version 2 is going to have. The day could end in complete trauma if just one thing goes wrong. If all goes well though, thousands of people will interact with the PF3000 and make memories that will last a life time. No pressure.

The rest of this story I will tell through pictures. Well, and captions to pictures. Special thanks to Shawn for taking the vast majority of these photographs for us.