art MACHINE
STAY IN SCHOOL
Sophomore students in VCU's Communication Arts Department were required to take foundational design class called Communication Vehicles. While no one seemed to understand the objectives of this class including our professor, and this made it my greatest class of all time -turns out I thrive with chaos and ambiguity. The assignments were confusing, outlandishly unspecific and quite possibly the most valuable hours of my entire education. Worth 20% of our final grade, the last assignment of the semester was surprisingly obtuse or so it seamed. Make an art machine.
WILE E. COYOTE
My inspiration came from the threaded jack on my dad's hand build hotdog cart (which I had spent all four years of high school Summers and some Winters towing around town and steaming buns and watching my makeup run and my curls droop) I had a few different ideas around what kind of art it would make, but I loved the idea of a pin striping machine. The first prototype was made from scrap metal spare parts he kept on hand to keep the hotdog cart in shape. For the final machine, I got a bit more custom swapping everything out with brass and custom cutting the frame. Nicknamed Candy Land, for it's very unhistorical color assortment, my color pallet was inspired by this little historical district where the art supply store was located. I still love to juxtapose decidingly butch geometry with "girly colors" and vice versa and using controversial color to grab my audience's attention. I had a vision for a slick store bought finish in everything I did,. You can probably tell I didn't like sanding very much but I love painting and built my own spray booth that served me well until graduation.
UNEXECTED RESULTS
Of particular note was a rickety Mouse Trap Game inspired concept comprised entirely of rocks, twigs and bits of garbage. And then there was this weird swinging thing that fell off it's presentation block, -that was a spectacle, but it was my art machine blew socks and minds. But greatness attracts negative attention too. After class the professor told me he believed I "received help" and that he was so sure he would be reducing my score by one whole letter grade. I dragged in my tools, left over materials, even my soldering iron as proof I'd done the work. I tried to help him appreciate my struggles of cutting angle iron with not the right saw for the job, and not the right file to smooth it out, he was not to be persuaded. That grade tipped my shaky A minus in the now dreaded B zone.
DESIGNERS READ THIS
I'm not mad at that grade, at least not now because when I went to fight for my grade, I was missing the point of the professor's albeit rude accusation but also the deeper semantic concept of art machines. I was so immersed in pride of craftsmanship, refining with the mechanism and just building the thing. Exhausted from what I considered then to be a ton of work (I had no idea) my instinct was defend that effort. But it wasn't the source of build he was question, it was the source idea. I thought I didn't invent this thing, and I didn't even show him my sketches. I hadn't defended my true value, my intellectual property. Who's the art machine in this story: me or this bucket of nuts and bolts? It sucks to be underestimated by others, but underestimate yourself and you underestimate your opportunities to transform sucky situations into great ones. Creatives who can make things will sell themselves short after the baby is born by staying behind the scenes allowing work to speak for itself. In a corporate environment, that makes it so easy to devolve into an art machine and this is how designers get burned out. This experience helped me to spot opportunities that require my creative intellect and problem solving skills universal to any endeavor. This has allowed me to move effortlessly into new product categories and industries, stay inspired, keep learning and progressing.
