Youth Educational Spaceship Lands in Vegas on November 15!

 Children enjoy the Youth Education Spaceship at Maker Faire 2013 (photo by Heather White)

Las Vegas, NV – The Youth Educational Spaceship (Y.E.S.) project is landing in Las Vegas! Y.E.S. is a mobile spaceship classroom built from repurposed and found objects by artist Dana Albany, together with kids from San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Hunters Point neighborhoods. This collaborative art program for youth gives them time and space to create, participate, and then exhibit their work, while engaging children in hands-on experience focusing on art and technology.

Y.E.S. will be open to the public at the Learning Village, 727 Fremont Street, starting Friday November 15, with a variety of family-friendly programming including spaceship tours, mosaic workshops with recycled materials, wiring demos and interactive robotic demos, culminating in a closing ceremony and children’s art show on December 8. For more information about programming, please click here.


This program is a collaboration between Burning Man Project and Las Vegas’ Downtown Project.

About the Y.E.S. Project
The project began with the construction of a beautifully crafted steel frame, 12’ in diameter and 11’ tall with an acrylic observation dome on top. Then a mesh and fiberglass shell created a blank canvas for children and community members to collectively create a mosaic, spaceship shell out of repurposed materials. There is a hatch that opens and whimsical stairs that allow visitors to enter the spacecraft’s interior. Inside, a TV monitor is installed with interchanging videos of space education, travel and a film directed by youth that captures “what life is like on Earth” from a child’s perspective. There is a fog machine, soundscape, vibration interface and an LED light installation with the capacity to run 130 different light sequences, as well as an interactive monitor/camera, a robotic microphone voice adaptation and a unique, interactive space control panel.

Children from the Tenderloin, Bayview/Hunter’s Point Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco were given the opportunity to help create a spacecraft under the guidance of many artists skilled in several disciplines. During the course of three months, the children made model spaceships and created mosaic stars and imaginary planets out of recycled glass, mirror, tiles, and repurposed objects collected at Recology and Building Resources. Their work adorns the exterior of the spacecraft. At the Crucible, the kids learned how to make fused glass tiles and the art of glass sand-casting, which has been installed in the interior. During the formation of the spacecraft they were engaged in discussions about recycling, creative reuse, environmentalism, solar energy, LED lighting, photography, soundscape creation, robotics, space travel and astronomy.

Y.E.S. will continue to travel serving as a future model of a mobile classroom for science and art education. It will dock at schools, art and science centers, museums and playgrounds.

The project has been made possible by the generous support, funding and sponsorship from Burning Man Project, Black Rock Arts Foundation, Black Rock City, LLC, the Exploratorium, Maker’s Faire, the Crucible and private donors.

For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/YouthEducationalSpacecraftProject.

 About Burning Man Project
The mission of the Burning Man Project is to facilitate and extend the culture that has issued from the Burning Man event into a larger world. This culture forms an integrated pattern of values, experience, and behavior: a coherent and widely applicable way of life. The survival and elaboration of this culture depend upon a cultivated capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.

The primary purpose of Burning Man Project is to uphold and manifest the values described in the Ten Principles of Burning Man. “Burning Man” is understood not as an event, but refers to a way of life lived consistently with these Ten Principles. Burning Man Project provides infrastructural tools and frameworks that will allow people to apply the Ten Principles in many communities and spheres of endeavor.

More information at www.burningmanproject.org.