RAILO 0.1 report - juha huuskonen

RAILO 0.1 Festival - 23-25 March - Joensuu, Finland

Festival homepage (in finnish) - photos from the event

The theme of the festival was 'ice and fire' >> the frozen lake and a snowy landscape vs. carefully designed light shows and heavy weight explosives.

Railo 0.1 festival was put together by a small group (10+) of people. These people where both the organisers, featured artists and the audience of the festival (apart from some cross-country skiers randomly passing by...).
 

1. Nice and calm... before we arrived:)
2. Kari Korolainen, the Artistic Director of the festival

1-2. The katastro.fi sign on snow (size 5 x 5 meters).

A big army tent was the accommodation for the whole crew, check some cozy photos from the photos page. To follow the festivals theme, the tent was placed on top of the frozen lake... we kept the tent warm the whole time and created a major hole to the lake surface, on the last day the floor of the tent started to resemble a swimming pool :)

Friday was the RAILO warmup event - we tested the official RAILO drink and some fire effects, ranging from some harmless fire spitting by the campfire to some more bigger and straightforward explosions.

1. The official RAILO drink, blue coloured liquid with unknown ingredients... turned into amazing crystals when frozen.
2. Our fireplace woke up a spider from it's winter sleep.

1-4. Some late night fire spitting....

1-4. And of course i had to try it myself.... :)

1-2. Explosion number 1...

1-4. ..and 2, this one producing a nice mushroom cloud.

Saturday was the day when we really got into business. After some kite flying and fun & games in show, we had to get some ice for our lighting specialist Mixa. The end result was a huge ice sculpture, you can find some pictures of it from the photos page. The photos were taken around 5-6 am on Sunday morning, the process to create the sculpture was approximately following:

1-4. Gotta get it : cutting out a cube of ice from the lake & lifting it to the surface.

2 pm - We use an ice drill and a chainsaw to cut a cube of ice out from the lake. This took a while since the ice was very think, and it took 4 guys to lift the cube out.

7 pm - We have now lifted 7 more cubes of ice from the lake. it's already getting quite dark.

10 pm - Mixa uses a chainsaw to cut the cubes of ice into smaller slices. Half of the cubes have been cut to pieces at this point. The chainsaw freezes up every now and then so Mixa has to take breaks and let it warp up for a while.

1 am - All the cubes have now been sliced. We now start to move them around and pile them up to from different shapes. It's extremely cold outside at this point but the work keeps you warm, the slices of the ice are still quite heavy.

3 am - The sculpture starts to find it's shape. At this point I go to tent to get some sleep with some others, a few of still stay to help Mixa.

5 am - Someone comes and wakes me up. I have to leave the warm tent to see the final show.

The whole surroundings of the tent are lit up by the powerful light coming from the huge ice sculpture (~10 meters wide, ~2 meters tall from the middle). Janne & co have prepared a magnificient lights & explosions show that lasts for ten minutes... great finale for the festival!

1-2. Preparing The Rocket.

In addition to the ice sculpture, many other things were created during the weekend: The Red Cube, The Rocket etc. I leave it to you to go trough the photos page and use your imagination to figure out what these were.

Railo 0.1 was a great experience, especially for an urbanized new media rat like me... The whole event was enjoyable in a very simple way, people did what they wanted to do and the only audience was the working crew itself (which didn't make the attention to detail any lesser).

And yes, the RAILO festival will most probably continue... Stay tuned, this was just the beginning! :)