Worth pointing out Grimes and this fella were emulating/riding the coattails of the Miss Rockaway Armada who’d been doing their thing for a few years at that point [0].
[0] https://archive.is/oaUF1 - NyTimes story
[0] https://archive.is/oaUF1 - NyTimes story
Here’s a video about the artist from around that time, including one of the raft projects. https://youtu.be/h9rTmTFMYH0
I happened to see one of these rafts being constructed. They may look like junk on the top, but that is just Swoon’s art style, a 3d collage of different materials. The raft platforms themselves were prototyped and tested. I am not a boating person so I don’t know how safe they really wore, but they were far more solid than you would expect from their outward appearance.
The whole thing was still a mad adventure though, one of my favorite art projects of the decade.
How many "Select all squares with..." captchas do I have to solve to access the site? I closed the tab on the fourth iteration.