Where do signs come from?

Greetings from the Wednesday crew. I'm Michael and I came to Zeum in February with John and several other interns from CAT. (We're the most recent teens here.)

First off, I don't think John has explained the presence of the Wednesday crew, so a little background is probably in order. Our school set up these great workplace learning opportunities for the entire junior class to come out to various places in the city that we might want to work in and act as interns. We picked Zeum and here we are.

As part of our internships, we each have to pick a project to do in order to help Zeum and to have something tangible to show at the end as sort of proof that we were here. In John's case that means the ZeumMaster's Winter Olympics video. My project involves updating the Zeum Gallery Model and installing vinyl around the building. Vinyl is everywhere in museums. Pretty much any signage you see up is made of it.

My projects focus more on making things and building stuff because I really like working with my hands.

I like to think that I'm something of an inventor/mad scientist.

Anything that gets my hands dirty.

That and exceedingly large hats.

Of course, this meant that I had to learn some new skills. I don't know about you, but my experience with vinyl was limited to the kind that has music on it. It turns out that in most cases it refers to this sticky backed sheeting that is used as signage all over the place. Whenever you go into a store and it has the hours on the door it's likely done in vinyl.

Here at Zeum we've got an awesome vinyl cutter that uses a computer interface to drag a knife blade across the sheets as it comes off of the roll. We then take it and stick it up on the walls.

Let me tell you that badly lined up vinyl is so glaringly obvious it hurts. That means that it might take up to ten minutes to line up a single piece. Levels, tape measures, x-acto knives, duct tape; all tools of the trade when it comes to getting this horribly sticky stuff up.

And it is sticky. So sticky that you only have one chance to get it right before it becomes a shredded, sticky mess of foul smelling plastic. Then it will stick to you better than anything else, which can also be fun. Vinyl is final.

On the scale of obnoxious materials to work with (10 being high), I would rate vinyl as maybe a three; right below burst toner cartridges.

(for ZeumMasters, the animator's clay rates a two and a half; slightly above playdough, but below machine oil with metal shavings.)