The amazing, blazing El Pulpo Mecanico is taking the world by storm. An animated, two-story-tall, fire-spewing mechanical octopus, the sculpture has become perhaps the most famous work by Humboldt County’s best-known artist, but few locally have ever seen Duane Flatmo’s piece in action.
Built specifically for the Burning Man festival in 2011, El Pulpo — with its herky-jerk tentacles that burst plumes of flame into the air — has developed a cult-like following. It’s the deity of a tongue-in-cheek online church that sprouted up in its reverence, and it continues to receive a steady flow of invites to arts, music and technology festivals across the country and beyond. And, in what’s possibly the steampunk creature’s biggest coup yet, it will be prominently featured on the Nov. 16 episode of the hit Fox television series The Simpsons, which will draw some 3 million viewers.
But the thing is massive, and not exactly street legal, so showing it locally has been very, very difficult. Weighing in at five tons, El Pulpo ships in 17 pieces, which have to be painstakingly packaged and secured on a 48-foot flatbed truck. The sculpture then has to be reassembled and fixed (something inevitably rattles loose) on location before it’s ready to dazzle. It’s a time consuming and expensive process — Flatmo estimates it costs $10,000 to $15,000 “just to get it out of the shop.” Consequently, save for one brief Arts Alive appearance, El Pulpo hasn’t met local audiences.
It seems long since time Humboldt County got introduced to one of its most recognizable offspring. To that end, the Journal has endeavored to tell El Pulpo’s story, from inception to The Simpsons. We sorted through reams of material and compiled a digital storytelling experience, with the help of Precision Intermedia and the contributions of photographers and videographers throughout North America. And we sat down with Flatmo for several hours to find out both what inspired him to build the jaw-dropping creature and how he and his team put the thing together over the span of three months in a Eureka warehouse.
Before the cartoon El Pulpo makes its debut, see its fire-breathing patriarch’s full story HERE on Nov. 16.
This article appears in EL PULPO MECANICO.
Duane Flatmo has contributed much to our community, but this project, (and the fire-breathing dragon), deserves a special recognition for drawing attention to the unrelenting frivolity of our culture’s inexplicable waste of rapidly dwindling resources, especially “cheap” oil, causing climate change and extinction rates far more rapid than scientists first calculated.
Imagine what is possible if Flatmo and other average citizen’s imagination and ingenuity were channeled into developing and distributing sustainable community energy and food sources.
Thank you Dwain!