Mark Verge, Elastic Park's chief dinosaur designer, took first place in the large sculpture competition at Twist & Shout 2010 in Chicago with this life size spinosaurus.

Last month I sent out a note asking everyone to vote online so that Elastic Park could receive a Pepsi Refresh grant. Thanks so much to all of you that helped.  It almost worked.  We were pretty high up in the ranks for a while and ended in 22nd place. Out of 204 entries, that’s not too shabby. And we were high enough that our entry was automatically resubmitted for March. We were close enough, I know we can make the top ten this month to get this show on the road. I have to admit, I was ready to let the whole thing drop just a few hours ago when I learned we didn’t win in February.  But the huge number of votes so far today has already pushed us into the top ten.

The Pepsi voting site is set up to allow (encourage?) people to vote for their ten favorite projects on a daily basis. That means we need as many people as possible to vote every day. A number of people asked last month for daily reminders to go vote. We’ve set up a  mailing list for people that want that daily reminder. I will not send a reminder to my regular mailing list since I don’t want to annoy everyone.  If you want to vote for Elastic Park and would like a daily reminder, please write to me directly or visit the sign-up page. If, and only if, you sign up for it, you’ll get a reminder once a day that it’s time to vote.  We’ll keep you informed on where we’re standing and any interesting dino updates we can give you.

A special thanks to the Pioneer Balloon Company and Gluedots for their support in getting this thing going. If there are any other businesses that would like to jump in and help us out, we’d greatly appreciate the support.

Vote for Elastic Park right now.

Get daily dino jokes, pictures, and reminders to vote.

This is it guys- the home stretch. Only 7 more days to vote daily for Elastic Park and get us into the top 10! Right now we’re hanging in there at 17, only a few steps away from getting the funding we need from the Pepsi Refresh Project to bring these amazing creations to life.

Your seven clicks could mean an amazing exhibit featuring giant balloon dinosaurs at Exploration Place in Wichita, KS.  We want the exhibit experience to travel other communities across the US- but we need to create the first exhibit in order to get the show on the road.

We’re so close to getting funded! If you want to see this exhibit- or even get the chance to be a part of our volunteer crew, we need to be in the top 10 by the end of the week. In order to do that, we need to reach new voters who will vote for our project daily through the end of Feb. Please- reach out to friends and family, share our project and ask them to vote daily!

If you’re new to this project, watch our proposal video below to see more:

THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT!!

Glue Dots Needs Your Votes for Elastic Park

Whenever the Airigami team is creating an installation, we keep GlueDots close at hand for positioning and adding detail to sculptures. We’re thrilled to have their support for Elastic Park!

You can help our efforts when you vote  for Elastic Park every day in February and  help spread the word about our Pepsi Refresh Grant on Twitter!  15 lucky winners will receive a free Dot N’ Go® Prize Pack!

To Enter:

• Follow @Gluedots on Twitter
• Then send this twitter message to your twitter followers:
  

  Vote, RT, Win @GlueDots DotN’Go Prizes! Vote & RT@elasticpark Jurassic Park-in BALLOONS http://bit.ly/epvote

Winners will be randomly selected by Glue Dots from the eligible pool of entries. The odds of winning depend upon the number of entries (followers) received. For more fine print, see the official rules

What are you waiting for!?! Get out there and start tweeting!

It’s a new year and time for Airigami to create a massive project. We spent a lot of time planning last year. Now it’s time to build Elastic Park, my vision of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Of course, these things always come down to funding. We’ve found funding that we know we can get -- with your help. All it will take is a few clicks from you.

Pepsi recently announced their intent to give away over a million dollars a month for community projects. The public will determine where the money goes. All you have to do is visit the Pepsi site to cast your vote. Each person is allowed to vote every day during the voting period (February 1-28, 2010). Please vote and spread the word. The more people we get to support the project, the better our chance of launching this national touring show. After voting, please ask your friends to do the same.

If you missed it before, here’s the summary:

Elastic Park is an exhibit, featuring a unique blend of art, pre-history, and pop culture. The multi-thousand-square-foot, interactive exhibit (scalable to fit available space) was inspired by Michael Crichton’s popular novel, Jurassic Park.

Balloons are the medium used to create the exhibit. The unusual medium draws a very diverse crowd both for the construction phase and the display phase. This is important since all large scale Airigami creations are community-based art projects. Community members are invited to participate in the 100,000 balloon creation, working alongside an international crew of skilled artists.

Visitors will walk among the creatures of the Triassic through Cretaceous periods, as described in Crichton’s work. An audio tour with custom music and actor’s voices will guide everyone through, describing the creatures, the art, and telling the story.

Like all major Airigami projects, Elastic Park is about the community. It would be cool if it was just an artistic display. But we’re taking it much further. We’re inviting the public to take part in the construction as well. So once we get the funding, we’re going to be asking all of you to join in and help turn our plans into the most incredible dinosaur exhibition seen in the last 65 million years.

While things can certainly change, we expect the first stop on this tour to be Exploration Place in Wichita, KS. This is a fantastic science museum with just the right family-friendly atmosphere for us to work in.

Thanks for your help. We’re looking forward to, once again, populating the planet with pre-historic dinosaurs.

Instructions for voting: Visit http://www.refresheverything.com/ElasticPark. There’s a link on the bottom of the page to sign in or to register with the site.  When the page refreshes, there will be a big white “vote for this idea” bottom on the top right side of the page.

We hope to have more information up soon but the Pepsi Refresh Project just posted their full grant application in the wee hours of the morning- so we’re scurrying to be one of the first thousand groups to submit an application. If When our application is accepted we’ll need your help to spread the word on how to vote for Elastic Park. Getting this grant would enable us to build the first Elastic Park!

Make sure you’re following us on twitter, @elasticpark and @airigami and we’ll let you know as soon as more information becomes available.