"something between a pointillist masterpiece and a chaotic disaster"

Jeff Stark and those wacky folks at Flux Factory invite you to make art with guns this Saturday at 8:00PM at the Flux lair in Long Island City. The party is free and will include live music, DJs, dancing and refreshments.

Paintball by Numbers is an interactive mural and an ongoing public performance. It begins with a large black-and-white mural on the side of a building. We will reproduce a classic landscape painting, approximately 10 by 15 meters. Picture a freshly painted white wall with black contour lines.

As with a traditional paint-by-numbers painting, numbers on our mural will designate the various colors that, if applied correctly, would bring the painting to its full-color reproduction.

Of course that will be near impossible. Festival-goers will be invited to help complete the mural, but not with brushes or spray cans. They will take aim at the painting with four separate custom air guns, placed 20-30 meters from the wall, and fire various colors of paint balls at their corresponding numbers on the wall.

The paintball guns themselves will be fantastical sculptural constructions, created from recycled and scrap materials on site. Imagine designs incorporating the imaginary armaments in Dr. Seuss's Butter Battle Book, the rusted machinery of the Road Warrior, and outdated World War II weapons. Each gun would be better understood as a sculpture itself, climbable, kinetic, and pneumatic.