El Pulpo Mecanico

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ikened to a two-story, steampunk windup toy that breathes fire, El Pulpo Mecanico has delighted nearly all in its path. After four fun-filled years, the journey continues, with an appearance slated for an upcoming episode of the Simpsons and more. Join us in taking a look back at El Pulpo's rise to becoming perhaps the most recognizable work of Humboldt County's most famous artist. We’ve broken El Pulpo’s story up into five chapters, which you can access directly through the images to your right. Or, click below for the full experience.

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North Coast Journal:
Thadeus Greenson, News Editor
Holly Harvey, Art Director/Production Manager
Drew Hyland, Marketing and Promotions Manager

Precision Intermedia:
Mike Rohan, Programmer
Deven Smith, Programmer

Contributing Photographers:
Julia Wolf
Trey Ratcliff
Michael Holden
Sarah Bartell
Duncan Rawlinson
Neil Girling
Josh Keppel Larry Jones
Neil Zeller Photography
Chris Malloy Photography
Pixels and Photons Creative
Denis Semenov
Denise Kitagawa
Gayle Laird © Exploratorium, All Rights Reserved
Drew Hyland
Bob Doran
Muir Adams
Mark McKenna
Marco Valentini
Oliver Fluck
Duane Flatmo

Contributing videographers:
Vera Neverkevich
Zubeyir Mentese, drone camera operator, CopterOptics
Amaris Blackmore ©Exploratorium, All Rights Reserved
Duane Flatmo

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El Pulpo Mecanico

a tale of art engineered

Inception
Our story begins with a boy, Duane Flatmo, who grew up in Santa Monica, California, the son of two artists. He loved tinker toys and building things, and was captivated by comic books. Sometimes during dinner, he’d sculpt dinosaurs out of chicken bones and mashed potatoes. Duane lived near Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, and was always fascinated by the theme parks, with their grandiose machines and rides, their fantastical characters and over-the-top spectacles.
As a young, aspiring artist, fate and a desire for small-town living drew Duane to Eureka, California, where he found work as a sign maker. Over the years, his career blossomed. He became known as a muralist, and his work could be found throughout Humboldt County, in random back alleys…
...and on some of the most prominent buildings in town.
A distinctive, “whimsical cubist” style became his hallmark, and began showing up on a host of local goods.
And Duane found an outlet for his lust for building — the Kinetic Sculpture Race, a three-day spectacle that sees scores of people take pedal-powered vehicles on a 40-mile trek over concrete, sand and water from the Arcata Plaza to the finish line on Ferndale’s Main Street. The race came to consume Duane, and his wild, elaborate machines became one if its highlights.
For Duane, the race was a joy. It gave him a chance to meld art and machine work, allowing him to use movement and sculpture to deliver a dramatic impact.
And Duane reveled in that impact, and loved watching people react to his work.
Over the years, Duane’s friends kept telling him about a festival out in the Nevada desert. Burning Man, they said, was something he simply had to experience. Duane would cut out articles about the event and save them in an envelope, but he was content to watch from afar.
Started in 1986, the arts festival has grown to annually draw some 60,000 people, who camp in the desert and form the make-shift Black Rock City, where they revel in a celebration of art, creativity, community and self-expression.
Many spend the entire year crafting machines and art installations for the playa, which morphs into a world of fantasy.
Elaborate temples and sculptures sprout across the desert in celebration of the creativity and ingenuity of the human spirit.
And like the event’s namesake, a 70-foot wooden man that looks out over Black Rock City, much of Burning Man’s art is temporary in nature…
..and set ablaze as the festival draws to a close.
Ultimately, it was two free tickets from friend Shaye Harty that dragged Duane to Burning Man for the first time with his friend, Bob Thompson. They brought one of Duane’s kinetic sculptures, and fell in love with the spectacle. “There’s a lot of spiritual stuff out there,” Duane says. “It’s not just a party. Nobody leaves that place without thinking, ‘What am I here for? What am I doing in this life?’ It kind of changed me.”
Before he could wash the desert dust from his clothes, Duane knew he’d be back to Burning Man. Inspired, he also knew he had to build something especially for the festival's stage. The question was, what?
Years earlier, on one of his kinetic sculptures, Duane had built a mechanical octopus. He liked the design, and had been looking ever since for an opportunity to make a gigantic one. Somewhere in the back of the artist’s mind, the idea clicked. It was a perfect fit.
Every winter, Duane and his wife Micki spend a couple of months in the city of La Peñita, Mexico, where they take time off, decompress and spend their days creating whatever captivates their imagination. In 2011, Duane went intent on creating a prototype for his Burning Man machine.
He spent days gathering materials — junk and trash found on the roads of the coastal enclave north of Puerto Vallarta. Then, he was ready to create.
Duane and Mikki had a small art show before leaving La Peñita, and Duane put his miniature mechanical octopus on display to show some of his Mexican friends. “They were saying, ‘That’s El Pulpo Mecanico,’” Duane recalls. “It just had a ring to it. It was the perfect name.”
Back stateside, Duane quickly set about transforming his little El Pulpo into the real thing. It was an effort that became all-consuming for him and a couple of friends. “When something takes over your life like that, you’re so excited you just have to get back to it,” he says. “That’s all you want to do.”

Construction
And Duane isn’t big on blueprints and advanced planning. “I like to jump into it,” he says. “Start building and figure it out as you go.” The first step was finding a vehicle to transform. First, they tried an old Ford Truck but El Pulpo would ultimately find its home atop an old Humboldt Community Access and Resource Center van.
“The first thing was just taking the van and cutting it into pieces, bringing it down to a low-profile, working canvas.” Now, it was time to create, and it all started with an old, rusty 55-gallon drum.
The finished tentacles were then attached to a frame standing above the van, then animated using a simple cam motor.
Duane then looked for a way to use that same motor to add some movement to the face.
He zeroed in on the eyes…
making them bulge and retract, linking them to the cam motor with some scrap metal and spare tubing.
With the four-sided face, equal parts menacing and playful, taking shape, it was time to turn the rest of the vehicle into a sculpture.
Duane pulled heavily from his old kinetic contraptions.
“It’s either just have it sitting around the shop or pull it off and put it on this and make something better,” he reasoned, adding that he already has too much “junk” lying around.
As Duane worked to master the aesthetic of the sculpture, his good friend Jerry Kunkel took on turning the sculpture into a full-blown, fire-spewing spectacle.
Jerry, Duane says, is a master tinkerer — an electrician and plumber who can build anything. "I'd never take on something like this without Jerry," Duane said.
Jerry crafted an elaborate system that takes liquid propane and converts it to propane gas that can be dispensed with a single control panel.
Four months after they’d started, Duane and his crew were ready for Burning Man. Well, almost. El Pulpo still hadn’t been put together, much less shot a single fire ball into the air. “We never put it together because the shop wasn’t tall enough,” Duane says. “We had to remove the walls just to get it out.” So, untested, El Pulpo was loaded in 17 pieces onto a 48-foot flatbed truck and shipped 400 miles to the Nevada desert.
Unveiling
“It’s like a giant erector set,” Flatmo said of piecing El Pulpo together after shipping.
First, they readied the frame…
and unpacked the pieces, fixing what had shaken loose during shipping and readying to assemble the beast for the first time.
They brought in machinery to do the heavy lifting.
attaching tentacles…
and the claws…
and finally the head.
With El Pulpo fully constructed…
it was time to gas up.
Then, with 200 gallons of propane on board…
El Pulpo set out for its maiden voyage.
Once El Pulpo began firing, the crowds gathered.
The reaction from onlookers, Duane says, was instant. “It just brings a smile to everyone.”
That’s how, in the fall of 2011, El Pulpo Mecanico was birthed in fire in the desert of Nevada. “That first year,” Duane recalls. “Nobody knew the name of the machine. Everyone just asked, “Did you see that f----ing octopus?”
Burning Man, Duane says, didn’t just bring El Pulpo to the masses. “The stage got bigger,” he says, adding that the festival draws visual artists from the likes of Pixar, Disney, the Los Angeles art scene and the tech industry.

Soon, opportunities came flooding in from people willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to bring the steampunk flaming octopus to their events. One of the invitations was from The Exploratorium in San Francisco.

Art Engineered
Duane says he couldn’t resist the chance to play with flames on Pier 39, in the heart of a city decimated by fire a century earlier. “To be able to shoot fire right on Fisherman’s Wharf, that was pretty cool,” he says. But before the flames could fly, the machine needed to pass inspection by the local fire marshals.
Turns out, it wasn't a problem, as fire marshals — like these in San Mateo — are some of El Pulpo's biggest fans. “They loved it,” Duane says. “They were like kids in the candy store.”
El Pulpo’s pyrotechnics are fueled by a system that takes 200 gallons of liquid propane, turns it into gas and transfers it through a warming tank, and up nine tubes, one running through each of the tentacles and the other through the top of El Pulpo’s head. Buttons on a control panel then allow the operator to release bursts of propane gas, which pass over a pilot light.
That night, they put on a show.
With a booming sound system on board, Duane says manning the controls of El Pulpo’s pyrotechnics is half fire, half percussion. “You can play it just like an instrument,” he says.
Like many of Duane’s sculptures, El Pulpo’s origins are humble, stretching back to the Arcata Scrap and Salvage yard.

Beauty of the Beast
There, Duane is known to spend hours sifting through the mounds and piles, looking for pieces to pluck out and repurpose.
He says he’s often drawn to the aluminum — shiny old muffin tins, baking dishes and other cookware.
“I sometimes feel that I’m one of those birds that collects all the shiny objects and stores them in their nests,” he says, adding that he already had a collection to choose from when it came time to build El Pulpo.
When envisioning what the fire-spewing beast would look like, Duane says he decided he wanted to play off contrasts and textures. When building the octopus, he worked almost exclusively with rusty materials, figuring they would make the sculpture stand out against blue skies. In contrast, Duane says, he knew the vehicle had to be light and shiny to pop against the backdrop of asphalt or the desert floor of Burning Man.
The result is almost two separate sculptures: the whimsically bedazzled vehicle, and the dark, 20-foot tall octopus looming above. “That’s what really sets it off from the background, it’s dark at the top, light at the bottom,” he says.
And Kinetic die-hards will notice plenty of pieces and elements plucked from sculptures past…
But El Pulpo is really built to have its maximum impact when the sun goes down.
Recently dubbed the “pyropus” by HBO’s John Oliver, El Pulpo’s full display is awe inspiring…
and never fails to drop jaws.
And that’s led to a host of opportunities for Duane and his crew to bring the flaming creature to events up and down the coast, and as far of as Calgary, Canada’s, Beakerhead, an international “smash up of art, science and engineering.”
And the stage just keeps getting bigger, and the doors keep opening.
David Silverman, director of The Simpsons, apparently makes Burning Man a part of his annual schedule, and is known for walking around playing a flaming tuba. This year, he came across El Pulpo. The two hit it off, and Humboldt’s most famous pyrotechnic octopus is now slated to be “prominently” featured on the Nov. 16, 2014 episode of The Simpsons and seen by some 3 million viewers.
Meanwhile, Duane and Jerry are busy working on creating a tour stage for the explodingly popular Israeli electronic dance group Infected Mushroom, who caught El Pulpo at Burning Man and loved the aesthetic.
And El Pulpo himself continues to inspire. A Burning Man regular created a Facebook page in its honor, The Church of El Pulpo Mecanico, that has grown to claim almost 4,000 likes. The appearance invites keep flowing in, but Duane pumped the brakes a bit after taking it down to a pair of techno festivals. “We started feeling a bit like carnies,” he says, “like we’re building a Ferris wheel, taking it down and moving on, eating corndogs. We thought, ‘El Pulpo is better than this. It’s an art piece.’ Not to say anything against carnies.”
Duane says he’s had some offers from people looking to purchase El Pulpo, but he’s not interested. “It would be kind of hard to see someone else driving it around,” he says. Plus, Duane says he simply loves watching people interact with the thing, seeing their knees buckle, their jaws drop and their eyes twinkle.
And, reminiscing about the first time he saw Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland, Duane says he loves sitting back and thinking about what El Pulpo might inspire others to create. The key, he says, is to just come up with an idea, roll up your sleeves and just start building.

You never know quite where it may take you.