Bot Shop Showing at the Manzanita Trash Art Show July 6th, 7th, & 8th

Showing July 6th thru the 8th! Including the B - Movie Bots, Fantoccinni Family, Jet Pack, 3D ORB and more! Head to the Manzanita Beach for the 4th of July fireworks and stay for the Trash Art Show! Come see the Bots!

MANZANITA TRASH ART SHOW INFORMATION!

Progress is Progress is Progess.

Back in the shop full of piss and vinegar and newly inspired after viewing the works of  Jud Turner and Chris Cole in person. I am in full rebuild mode. Ricoh is not only up, he is flying, and Gamma 32 is officially on the able. I have a lot. LOT, lot, lot, LOT of rewiring to do on him. He was originally all D/C current, wired using a series of 9v batteries. Time for 110 A/C. No more battery changes and body disassemblies. In other words, I have a lot of wiring and re-wiring to do on him so I can just plug him in. With the deadline for my work to be ready for the Manzanita show quickly approaching, I feel I am on top of it and making good time. If things keep up at this pase, I may just get BOTH of the chairs ready in time too! (I started a new job which is, of course, as draining as much as it is time consuming.) The shop is also taking new form as it grows and changes along side my work endeavors. Look for new Bot Shop II images up next on Welcome to the Bot Shop!

Up, up, and Away!

MVI_1047 by f1130528460

MVI_1048 by f1130528460

Monsters in Motion! B - Movie Bots Coming to Life!

I have been working on the idea of adding movement to the B- Movie bots for quite some time. HELLO TIME! AND! In time for the Manzanita Oregon Trash Art Show, I am finally completing these updates to the work. Here is a (mostly co-herent) video sneak peak of the changes in progess. (likely to change a lot as the setup takes shape.)


Adding motion to the Bots by f1130528460

Disassemble, Sort, Clean, Repeat!

CURRANT WORK UPDATE!!!

     Tonight, the last of the vintage adding machines was disassembled. The research I have done shows that the oldest one was manufactured around 1909, while the newest was from the 1960's. None of them were working or worth much of anything. I purchased all four of them for a grand total of $30 over the course of the 3 years of looking. The pile of parts is minuscule by way of comparison to the copiers, however, the parts are amazing in detail. Mostly brass and aluminum with black accents. I am still somewhat concerned about the steam punk aspect of the black and copper/bronze look. I have never considered myself to be a steam punk artist. I do love some of the steam punk works. But me? Steam Punk? I suppose I should be more open to it, but for now, I will follow my gut and a new direction of my own. In this case, Shel Silverstein.
 

Shel Silverstein Sketch

      I remember the uneasy feelings evoked by some of Shel's writing. I had been exposed to his then new poetic and illustrated works a young child. The disturbing look to his doodles had a haunting effect on me for quite some time. Capturing that same emotion and representing the writings in sculptural form intrigues me. I plan to re-read all of his books (I have the entire anthology) and really re-examine the drawings as well. Perhaps more info on his personal life and outlook too. Research, research, research.

     During this time of research, I will also get to work sorting the individual parts taken from the adding machines I just finished disassembling. With the copier parts, it was pretty straight forward. Black plastic here, white plastic there, colored plastic here. Metal posts in one box, metal gears in another, etc.  These machines have VERY LITTLE in the way of plastic parts. I will need to really familiarize myself with all of the parts in order to create categories for the sort. As I have mentioned before on the blog, the sort is as much of a part of my process as anything else. Sorting may start one way, change and go another, then return the way it was. Sometimes several times over for that matter. But all this sorting imbibes me with an intimate working knowledge of the parts I have and what they would be best used for and how they might relate to one another.
     Its interesting, not knowing where I am going with this, and only God knows where it will end, but I am excited and working, so for that I am a truly grateful artist and human being.

B - Movie Bots to Show at Manzantia Trash Art Show!

!See Us In Person! 

B-Movie Bots Gamma 32 vs. King Ricoh

The annual Manzanita Trash Bash (renamed Trash Art Show) will be heald at the Hoffman Center in Manzantia Oregon this year. As if you needed another reason to head to the coast, my work will be showing! I have spoken with the powers that be and it sounds like there will be room and hopefully appropriate lighting scenario for the B - Movie Bots! I may include the Sci - Fi Chair and Pump if I can get them full active by the date of the show. WHICH BY THE WAY IS JULY 5th THROUGH JULY 8TH! So if you have been following along on the Bot Shop Blog and have been looking for your chance to see these works in person, this is it! They have not shown since PSU in Portland. I will spend at least 1 week worth of work hours (tongue twister) on each piece prepping it for the show. Sadly, the folks at CleanNeon have told me they are having issues acquiring the rare green UV materials and are out of green aerosol. This means that Gamma 32 (the spider) will have to show without touch up which he desperately needs. I could order a jar of the liquid in green, however, I do not have an air brush gun and getting the mix just right can be tricky. We shall see. (Not to mention I am a starving artist, quite literally, these days.) SO! Come on out to the Oregon Coast for a very GREEN, Earth friendly, artistic event and enjoy some beach time while you are at it! Hope to see you there! J.A.W. More info on the Trash Art Show can be found at the link below (formerly held at CARTM and now jointly sponsored and held at the Hoffman Center!)

!!!Manzanita Trash Art Show!!!

Keep an eye out for Bot Shop Blog Updates regard the the 2012 Trash Arts Show!

Have A Seat - Stay Awhile

 

Antique Vintage Sci-Fi Cair - In Progress

     Imagine sitting down in a machine, capable of changing you in any number of un-foretold ways. A canopy drops from overhead, switches are flipped, motors hum, lights flash, cool air passes over your face, and vibrations are felt throughout your body, heightening the experience. Even worse, what if this experience was forced upon you! Sci-Fi movies have created wildly imaginative, clunky and slick, mad and brilliant machines over the decades, but the B – Movie low budget sci-fi chairs were by far the best for me. Finding the passion for this project was simple, however, engineering the machine was not….

H.G. Wells - Time Machine

   The first science fiction chair I can remember is that of H.G. Wells and his Time Machine. I remember seeing the 1960 movie version many times over in my life, usually on Saturday afternoon or Sunday matinee T.V. However, there have been other inspiring chairs in science fiction. Some could read your mind (or perhaps wipe it clean) with the push of a button, while others would make the user invisible, taller, smaller, or smarter! They are the amazing machines of the science fiction world that allow a simple human to be altered in complex and limitless ways. (Usually created by an evil genius I might add) For my Antique Vintage Sci-Fi Chair piece, I addressed these thoughts. However, I also wanted to incorporate another idea that was inspired by an emotional response that I still get to this day. 

     The response in question comes from video game arcade and amusement parks.  That response to getting into a chair behind the wheel, joystick, or buttons of a game I have never played before. Of course this was far more prominent for me as a kid, eagerly pumping quarters into the machine to see just what it would do! Anticipation, wonder, and interaction all rolled up into one small private space. Combining these ideas and emotional responses, the Sci-Fi Chair and the interactive arcade/type experiences were the final concepts that went into the work.

     I want to let those who sit in the device flip the switches that will in turn provide sound, feeling, and visuals to inspire their own minds. So the name of the piece has been kept ambiguous. Is it a time travel chair? Maybe. Is it a mind reading device? Why not? Is it going to hurt me or scare me? Lets find out! Will it change my life forever? I hope so.... I am often asked, "What does it do?" by those about to sit in it. This never fails to make me smile, for it is the very question I sought to evoke from those viewing/experiencing it. I simply reply, "What do YOU think it does?," and I smile. 

***My next udate will take place on the Sci-Fi Chair page. Additional images, a full detailed description, and video. Bot Shop out.***

 

Bots & Pieces - Accidental Happiness!

Okay! So! Before I move on to the Antique Sci-Fi Chair project post and image gallery, I have decided to post some of the other happenings around the Bot Shop. The shop is truly a living thing for me. It needs attention as do the actual works. The walls, floor, ceiling, and even the scraps from other projects, demand attention. Some of the testing results in the past have become unintended art among the art I create. They are not process driven. They are not pre-determined in any way. They just seem to happen. They happen along side of the work as works themselves. They are happy accidents (much over used and all completely true art terminology these days.) In the Bot Shop I call them graffiti or leftovers. Some are just that, while others are just starts to something greater, waiting their turns at the primary focus attention table. Some come from testing products like UV mediums, woods, metals, etc. Others from scrap materials leftover from currant projects and the photographs I take as documentation to the works in process. So without further adue, I present, the leftovers and graffiti work of the Bot Shop. Enjoy!

Let it glow, let it glow, let it glow....

     Sci-fi based work not only deserves special effects, but for me, it begs for them! Sounds, laser beams, special lighting, and movement of some kind, are all a necessity! While I had kept this issue to a bare minimum with the Fantoccini family (they only had lights in their chest plates and one light in the babies head), the new pieces I had in mind would need to really push the special effects envelope in order to be effective. How does one accomplish this on a starving artists budget?

     The answer came to me while at the movie theater. I had gone to see the new Tron Legacy movie, an update to the original Tron I had seen when I was 10 years old, and was completely amazed at the glowing suits, vehicles, and landscapes once more. When I got home that night I did some net searches on the special effects used in the movie and came across a company named ClearNeon. These guys provided the paints used in many of the scenes in the movie, and at just $20 dollars or so a can, they were within my reach. 

     These paints are truly impressive. They are nearly invisible in normal lighting conditions but glow blue, white, red, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange, and dark black under UV (black lights) lighting. An additional bonus was their non-toxic natural chemical make up. If all that was not enough to make them a cool option, they smell too. Orange like a cream sicle, white like vanilla, pink like bubble gum, red like cherry, and so on and so forth! A truly amazing product. 

  

   Further research on their website turned me onto the UV reactive 3D glasses they sell. I ordered just two pair at first. They were your basic, cheap, plastic/paper glasses, much like the ones you would have been given at 3D movies in the 1970s and 80's! They made the work POP! The fact that they also fit in with the theme of my work was a simple bonus and made them a must have for my showings. 

     

Upping the anti - and the scale!

     With my first works, The Fantoccini Family, complete and shown I felt a need to scale up and break out. I achieved both. Upping the size of the work just seemed like a logical step, given the corresponding size of the parts I was working with. It was a medium based decision all the way. Bigger! = Better? = Not necessarily. However, bigger due to specific medium requirements was a yes all the way.  So the first decision I made was to up the scale. Finding direction for the new work was another matter entirely. What in the same genre would translate best?

Godzilla

     I knew I wanted to continue with the same line of thinking as the Fantoccini Family. I had been stealing glimpses of my past, as found through journal entries, writings, and recollections. I wanted to apply these sci-fi, media based, memories of my youth to this newly found passion. I needed a topic that was seemingly larger than life. Both larger in media and in scale. Nothing, to my relocation at the time, was larger than life than the Sunday morning televised matinee of the Godzilla series of movies. The B-movie genre in general had always appealed to me and was already translating quite successfully with the Fantoccini work I had just finished. Direction found.

Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla

      I watched Godzilla religiously on good old channel 5. We only had 4 stations after all. It was either that or Business Watch, Soul Train, or Columbo! What would you have chosen? Each episode brought massive monster combatants, really bad lip synching, and piss poor acting, to my young mind. One of the first heroine I acted out as a child with friends on the playground was Godzilla. He was the good guy after all, even if he started off as the opposite. He battled all sorts of baddies, like King Kong, Mothra, Mecha-Godzilla (My personal favorite BTW), and king Ghidorah. Godzilla could glow in the dark and throw electricity and flames from his mouth. He was a bad ass. Power Rangers be damned, he was the original ass kicker! I meant to honor him, if not his nemesis and original genera of B-movie style monsters. Cheesetastic!   

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah

 
  So into the build I stepped, thinking of little more than the original Godzilla episodes and B-movies of the like. Enter King Ricoh. Named both for the copiers I derived his parts from and the ultimate three headed baddie from the Godzilla movies, King Ghidorah. I originally envisioned all three heads and a set of giant wings, but in the end, I settled for one head and massive wings with glowing UV tips. I wanted to create a copier bots version, in UV lighting for effect, of two rough neck monsters battling it out much like the original Godzilla monster battles I watched in my youth.

Spiga

     Enter King Ricoh's nemesis, Gamma 32! While King Ricoh was a single headed take on King Ghidorah, Gamma was a near free for all, loosely adapted from Spiga. He was to become a mutant, radiated, overgrown, spider and nemesis to King Ricoh. Gamma 32, named after an electric motor manufacturer/supplier for large industrial office copy machines, was to be an 8 foot by 8 foot spider with moving parts, motors, and lazer based special effects. He would stand his ground against King Ricoh, and complete a mostly stationary scene that lived only in my mind as envisioned from my youth. The GOOD monster vs. the BAD monster. A new and completely confusing concept to a 7 year old kid. But I remembered, none the less.

Next Post - An update to The B - Movie Monster Bot section of the blog complete with build details and images. 

Mr. Bradbury, this ones for you.

Ray Bradbury

   
     Would you purchase a robot to replace the loss of a loved one? What if that robot could seem completely human? Ray Bradbury asked this very question in his short story entitled "I Sing the body electric." The story, later made into an episode of the Twilight Zone, had long been a favorite of mine. Ever since I picked up a book of his short stories in elementary school I was hooked on his works. My all time favorite was entitle "Something Wicked This Way Comes," later made into a cult classic movie as well as a set of homage images I created in my early photographic work.  His writing spans over 500 published novellas and short stories. To quote his website (www.raybradbury.com) "He is one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think." COMPLETELY TRUE!

Matrix Incubators

Terminator Skull

     Bradburys influence on me needed homage once more. So thinking back on some of his more influential stories, I remembered I Sing The Body Electric. The story was about a family whose young mother had passed on, leaving the father to care for his two sons and daughter. The father turned to a new company called Fantoccini Ltd, who could provide him with an electronic grandmother to help soothe the children and make life easier for them all. This idea of robots replacing humans captivated me. It wasn't until later in life that movies like Terminator and The Matrix also put the spin on machines perpetuating themselves.

      I knew I wanted to create a robot. The bits and pieces of copier I had been sorting were calling for it. No, screaming for it! I began to combine very crude assemblages held together with banding wire and magnets. Maquettes really. As I moved forward with my first build, I decided to combine the ideas first implanted in my mind by Mr. Bradbury with the notion of machines perpetuating their own existence. A robot family.
     I had my idea, a plan to move on, but I still needed to find a way to attach meaning and theory to it all. I decide to give them social roles. The same sort of roles many basic nuclear american families held during my youth and at the time I was first exposed to these notions of robotic humanoids. For better or worse. Thus was born, The Fantoccini Family of Robots. A father, strong and proud, warrior like provider and protector. And a mother, who not only hunched forward in her tired laborious stance and purpose drivin engineering, but who was also carrying a child in her robotic womb. Each piece required hundreds of hours of work. The pieces were fragile due to their intricate details and overall size. This required massive amounts of patience. From maquette and concept, to a fully formed, fully realized sculptural work set. In my next post, you will see the images of these creations from first rough assemblage to final construction and subsequent gallery showing. Here is a sneak peak.....

What a mess! Bots and pieces.

     As seen in the stop motion video from my previous post, these machines were truly intricate and complex devices containing more parts than the average automobile. I now had a massive pile of copier pieces to deal with! MASSIVE! As I began to sort through them, with recycling in mind, I began to make connections. At first, the connections to each piece I held seemed to be linked with human anatomy *snicker*. A set of optics from one copier reminded me of eyes, as they might have to anyone who was trying to think along the same lines as I was. But then, things got more involved. Hinges for the top of the copier looked more like back bones than limb joints. Ball bearing rollers from the paper drawers were ribbed and cage like. The gears and bearings all begged to be envisioned in new ways. Anything from wheels on a car, to eyeballs on a creature of some kind. I decided I needed to really sort this stuff out and see where it would lead me.

     I purchased 20 bins from the local dollar store to begin sorting the pieces. I sat on the cold floor of my garage for hours on end that first week as I tried to make sense of what belonged where and why. For example: White plastic was certainly different than black plastic, but colored plastic just had no business being in with either. Metal rods all came in different lengths and widths and some were covered in plastic, or perhaps rubber, or had  permanent gears on them! And the sheet metal, wow, large, medium, and small, some similar, others unique. Individual sets for each. It all needed sorting in my eyes. So each found a home within its own group. Groups grew and changed and shrunk and grew again. But when it was all said and done, I not only had a very well sorted and categorized set of copier parts, I had an extremely intimate knowledge of how each part related to one another, aesthetically speaking, and/or to something in my own imagination. With what ended up being two fully dismantled industrial copy machines worth of bits and pieces and all seperated, sorted, and spread out before me, I begin to look for a direction. As I sat and wondered where all this started or came from "The Whatchumacallit"(See my first blog post here), I began to see a need to apply my passions and my past, to my present. Sorting became a daily routine. With each new copier I obtained, the more sorting was needed. It became more and more complex. Even the individual diodes and fuses from circuit boards fell pray to individuality in the process of sorting. First two, then four, then five, six, seven...twelve, and the list went on. Machine, after machine, after machine. The more parts I gathered and sorted, the more complexly they inter-related with one another.

Next update: Applying dreams and inspiration to a medium unlike any other. 

"Begin at the beginning."

Everyone has a history, not everyone draws from it. In my case and in the case of the Bot Shop, it all started with an office copy machine sometime around 1980. When I was about 7 or 8 years old. my father decided it would be fun to take apart a copy machine to see what made it tick. (He did things like this you see.) Once he broke the machine down and figured out how all its bits an pieces worked, he recomposed them into something new and exciting. He called it a Whatchamacallit, (thingamabob was already taken) and once plugged in, a captivating show of light, sound, and movement ensued. (Especially captivating to a certain 7 year old boy.) Bars raised up and crashed down with a pinging, ringing, clash while lights flashed blindingly, gears turned, motors hummed, and even electricity bolts shot from one probe to another. It was fantastic. 

Fast forward thirty some odd years.........

I find myself in arts school. A place quite foreign to me as I never even took art in high school, let alone did any form of art other than photography before hand. I was given a project in a time based arts class to create a video. A few weeks before this took place I acquired two VERY large and EXTREMELY heavy industrial office copiers. I had no intention of creating sculptural works out of them at the time. I had merely been thinking of the Whatchamacallit. Having moved into a place that actually had a garage space, I decided to combine my love of photography (the original reason for arts school) and deconstruction, a passion I had from childhood on for taking apart the man made wonders of the world to see how they worked. Using only a hand held remote and a digital camera, I spent three grueling days of work in the soon to be titled Bot Shop. The resulting video was comprised of thousands of individual still images that I later reassembled to form a 7 minute long stop motion animation staring yours truly.... And here it is. 

 COPIER DECONSTRUCTION VIDEO!   COPIER DECONSTRUCTION VIDEO!

Office Copier Deconstruction - Stop motion by f1130528460

Notice all those parts, bits, and pieces at the end of the video? More on that in the next update!

WELCOME TO THE BOT SHOP!!!

This, the inaugural post dedicated to the place I create works of pure imagination and thought provoking creativity, is little more than an image of the studio I lovingly call, The Bot Shop. The studio is a place of playful inspiration. A massive palette of blank walls and empty tables that beg for color and idea. A place of practice, patience, and proof. A place the artist calls home. In the near future, I will update this blog with the endeavors of the Bot Shop. Details on my choices of medium, inspirational backgrounds, and goals of communication for my works, will be revealed. Wether you love art, sci-fi, or just good ol' fashioned American ingenuity, this blog aims to communicate with you, and to inspire. Thanks for reading,

                                                                                                                                      Jeff Wallen