"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!