History's Greatest Monster

The task for this assignment was to come up with a “monster” that would be born from the imagination of our fictitious culture, and then construct it out of cardboard.  I had a hard time coming up with something that would terrify a population that was addicted to technology while staying within the parameters we were given.  The obvious answer was to embrace the “yin” to technology’s “yang”: Nature.  I thought that was a little too obvious, plus, I didn’t love the idea of having to make plants and sticks and rocks out of cardboard, when I have a whole pile of the real thing sitting within arms length from a previous project.  I considered making something with giant scissors for hands, and calling it the “Cord Cutter” but then, plenty of people I know use that term in the positive, to signify ditching cable in favor of digital streaming services.  It’s aspirational, not frightening.  Not to mention the fact that most of the devices people are addicted to don’t use wires or power cords these days anyway.  I thought about a monster that when it clapped its hands, emitted an EMP that disabled electronics, but then, do most people even know what an EMP is (an electromagnetic pulse) and how do you convey that concept through difficult to manipulate cardboard?  Another loser.  What is something truly terrifying to technophiles?  The antithesis of all they stand for?  A creature so abominable, they dare not admit that it exists, for to do so would be to admit that God must also exist, and he has forsaken them?

This is Dave.  He works for Geek Squad.

He’s the guy your grandma calls when her computer stops working, and you’re not answering your phone.  He has no real expertise, charges an obscene hourly rate, and takes all day to accomplish what you could, for free, in half an hour…if you weren’t screening Granny’s calls.  Dave from Geek Squad is a monster, but he was birthed from one far more loathsome: You.  The selfish, disinterested grandchild, fully aware that your refusal to accept the minor inconvenience of assisting a (supposed) loved one would spawn such a beast, and yet doing it anyway.  You hate Dave from Geek Squad not because he is a monster, but because he is a mirror.

I got a little flowery there.  Basically, you only see this dude when something is broken, and whether he is of help or hindrance is as predictable as where the wind will blow.  He’s the technology addicted society’s version of the Baba Yaga.

He’s also about 15 inches tall, and made from Amazon boxes, toilet paper tubes, and empty 12 packs of Mountain Dew Zero Sugar.

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The Devil Came Down to...Wherever This Is.

The imaginary culture I’ve been working with this semester, as originally proposed, revolved around the idea of a society addicted to technology.  I’ve waivered back and forth over whether I wanted to stick with this concept, but at this point in the academic calendar, it feels weird to bail on it.  We’re so close to the end, might as well see it through.

The assignment this time was to create a “tunnel book” depicting the main thoroughfare of our fictional society.  My culture isn’t that far removed from contemporary society, aside from the fact that they’re gelatinous blob people, like humanoid Gummy Bears.  As such, I figured their city streets wouldn’t look much different from our own.  I wanted to depict some kind of significant event happening behind a populace too distracted by their devices to notice.  I went through multiple iterations of what this “event” might be, from nuclear attack, or an impending asteroid strike, to a rampaging Godzilla.  As is so often the case, my grand ideas were quickly mitigated by my skillset and my supplies, so none of those came anywhere close in execution to what they were in my mind.  I took stock of what I still had available to me, and noticed that while I’ve burned through tons of construction paper this semester, I’ve barely touched the red colored sheets.  And thus, Main Street was visited by the giant, disembodied head of the Devil himself.

In retrospect, I should have been more conscientious of the whole while constructing this thing.  I planned it out pretty well in advance, but didn’t take the time to spot check the way the various panels were playing off of each other as I went along.  Because of this, the various pages feel much more cramped than I was anticipating, which flattens the feeling of depth and obscures some of my background elements.  I also wish, having now viewed my classmate’s versions of this project, that I’d been a bit more ambitious and elaborate with my designs.  I stuck to very simple, rudimentary shapes as I knew I could comfortably cut them out of paper.  If I ever do this again, I’m going to pony up the $2 for a scalpel and try to ramp up the complexity.

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Time is On My Side. And On My Floor. And in My Trash.

This next project is a pinhole camera, also known as a “time changer.”  That title is accurate, as time has definitely changed since I started it in March, and finished it in May.  We began this project just before Spring Break, as butterflies danced atop the heads of dandelions reaching towards the sun, like arms, emerging from a verdant sea.   Birds were singing, rainbows straddled the horizon line, and all around, the inescapable promise of life born anew! 

Now we’re in the midst of a global pandemic.  Those verdant fields have been replaced with crimson streets awash in blood, the sunshine, with rains of smoldering ash.  I fall asleep to distant screams and wake up to cacophonous silence.  The apocalypse has come.  Is this blog post still a homework assignment, or an epitaph for mankind?

In all seriousness, it feels like a lifetime has passed over the course of this project.  When I brought it home from school, it was a fairly intricate clay sculpture: A monstrous head, sitting upon a column wrapped in a twisting knot of intertwined appendages.  When I took it out of its box last week, it looked like a tin can sitting on a pile of cocaine.  Within 2 months, all of the clay had disintegrated into dust.

The focus of my work thus far has been on technology addiction, so my original concept involved a beast covered in eyeballs holding a dozen or so digital devices around its periphery.  I was trying to communicate a sense of stimulus overload.  When it broke, I needed to come up with a more abstract method of conveying the same idea, but using the limited number of supplies available to me during quarantine.  Was there a way I could rebuild this with 17 cases of Diet Dr. Pepper and a monolith of empty pizza boxes?  Ultimately, what I settled on was covering the tin can with broken shards of old CDs and the salvageable clay eyeballs I had leftover from my previous attempt.  I liked the way the shiny surfaces of the CDs acted like dozens of small mirrors, catching and reflecting light and images, providing too many sources of information to focus on.  I also appreciated that the CDs represent an archaic form of digital media, used to construct a relic of a digital culture.  It’s awesome when I blindly stumble into unintended metaphorical gravitas. 

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This isn’t what I had in mind when I started, it was much more difficult to execute than I imagined, I made a huge mess, and went through a lot of frustration and discarded materials to get here, but I made something.  This seems to be the recurring theme of all of my projects this semester.  And yet, I’m not complaining.  I’m a control freak and impossible to please.  In the end, learning to let go, embrace failure, and make the best of a limited skillset will probably be the most valuable thing I’ll have taken from this class.