Art
Art Installation Recycles Over 1,000 Red Bull Cans
Innovative artists create a masterpiece out of recycled Red Bull cans at the Lost Lake Music Festival.
With headliners like Chance The Rapper, The Killers and Odesza, the sounds of the rainforest are not what comes to mind when you think about the Lost Lake Music Festival in Phoenix. But that’s exactly what the attendees heard from an eight-foot-high structure that combined sculpture, art and engineering: the “Matter Horn.”
The piece was created by Arizona artist collective TruCollective and built throughout the three-day festival on a Red Bull-hosted stage. We talked to the founders of the collective, brothers Thad and Jordan Trubakoff, about their creation and what it took to bring it to life.
Recycled art installation
© Ryan Fleming
According to the brothers, the idea came organically: “The words just came out of our mouths. Let’s make a horn for something that matters — the Matter Horn. Let’s make it out of matter and let’s give a voice to something that doesn't have a loud one nowadays, which is nature, and then we piped sounds of the rainforest through it.”
Then came figuring out how to cut the cans open and remove the tops and bottoms — and fast! Enter innovation: The artists engineered their own can-cutting machine to speed up the process.
1,000 recycled Red Bull cans became art
© Ryan Fleming
“The lightweight cans that Red Bull uses were far different than any other that I’ve ever cut open and worked with in the past. They were a lot more malleable,” Jordan shared.
TruCollective started with a direct computer simulation of the surface area to estimate how many cans they would need: 1,200. All of the materials used to create the Matter Horn were repurposed, from the cans to the wood, which came from the TruCollective shop. They used scraps of wood from shipping crates and domestic hardwood leftovers from coffee and dining room tables like walnut, cherry and ash.
Sound was added on day three. They tried rain and thunderstorms, but according to the team, it wasn’t until they started piping the sounds of the rainforest perked the extra attention of festival attendees.
People started talking to them and asking questions like, “Why are you doing this?” “What is it made of? and “I had no idea that you could use cans to do this.’”
Matter Horn art installation
© Ryan Fleming