Generating Joy Part 4: Sparky the Giant Rideable Unicorn

Sparky at Burning Man in 2019.

This is part four of a five-part series about the Ithaca Generator to accompany the Generating Joy show at the Cherry Gallery from 1/23/26 to 3/8/26.

After the success of bringing our Man Alive 30-foot tall bamboo puppet mounted on a 12’ x 12’ quadracycle electric fat bike to Burning Man in 2018, Karl, Doug and I needed to come up with something even more spectacular for 2019. Karl and Doug came up with the idea of building a giant rideable unicorn. They needed my help for the welding part. They showed me a rough sketch. “Okay I can help you build that,” I told them. Little did I know how much Sparky would change my life.

And so Sparky was conceived. Doug and I spent dozens of hours every month for the next four months working first at the Generator and then in his garage. Together we created a highly interactive, electric-assist four-wheeled art bike. Sparky can be ridden by four people—two people in the saddle and two people pedaling the bike cart. (Later we added electric motors.) Sparky stands about 11 feet high, 4 feet wide, and 11 feet long . He is basically a large puppet—he has an articulated head that can nod and shake and he has moveable legs that can make him appear to trot like a horse. Sparky is constructed out of a welded steel frame covered in chicken wire and fabric, and he is lit by over 6,000 LEDs. His bike cart carries a state-of-the-art sound system that can get any party mystically moving and grooving. Sparky is designed to be disassembled to fit inside a 14’x6’x6’ trailer for transport.

It turns out that unicorns are very popular right now. They are the totem animal for almost all seven-year-old girls in the United States and are revered by many adults as well. Wherever we take Sparky a crowd gathers around him, typically made up of strikingly beautiful women, little girls, gay men and straight men who have been dragged over by a spouse. Sparky made an appearance at Burning Man in 2019 as planned (and also in 2022 and 2023) but he has also appeared in dozens of festivals and parades all over the country. We discovered that if you tell a festival director that you can bring a giant rideable unicorn, they are generally willing to give you gas money and free tickets to come to their festival. Here is my humorous description of one such festival Judy and Sparky and I attended, a sky diving “boogie” held in eastern New York.

Coming up next: Generating Joy Part 5: My Solar Tandem Project.

Sparky at the Figment art festival in New York City in 2019.