Working with Found Objects

 

One of the first things I thought of before I found anything for this project was the toothpaste cap city that Charlie Bucket built in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). It was such an excellent commentary on how happy such a simple thing, such as deformed toothpaste caps that his father brought him from his job, made Charlie. And Charlie, being such a wonderful kid, was making a model of the Wonka Chocolate Factory where his Grandpa Joe used to work. 

For this project, instead of going somewhere like Goodwill to "find" objects, I opted to look outside and in the trash. Since this was a class project, our professor basically had a stash of cool things kept outside for us that were disposed of. I found a microwave and a Nikon photo scanner from around 2001. I've actually found that on places like Amazon, the Nikon photo scanner sells for upwards of $2, 993. The microwave, I am unsure of, but it was cool to tear apart such expensive machines and see how they worked.

Once I had successfully removed the insides of both machines, I was left with a bucket of wires, fans, and coils. I had forgotten about the toothpaste cap city and was stuck on what to do. I played around with the idea of doing an aerial view of an open heart surgery, as my mom has recently had heart surgery, but I could not get things correctly positioned the way I wanted. It was not until a friend of mine pointed out that the way I had positioned a motherboard and a battery together looked like a city that I was reminded of the toothpaste cap city.

From here, I launched into creating my own little mechanical city. I was hot glued pieces onto the motherboard and onto one another to assemble it. There are smaller motherboards on top of one another to represent different areas of the city. The lightbulb is the city powerplant, with cogs turning to power it. There is an arch, a welcoming into the city. Grey apartment buildings scattered throughout. Round black buildings as the hubs of entertainment. The clear pieces are water, with a small chip as the dam.

The city is a booming metal, mechanical, metropolis. In many ways, it represents our own today. I thought about the toothpaste cap city and how in the film, Charlie's dad's job was being replace with robots. Much like our own society, many jobs are being replaced with AI. My own mother does work that advances the progress of AI everyday. Eventually, in some ways, I'm convinced the world may be like this- bleak and metallic, maybe the grass might just look like a motherboard if we stare hard enough. Maybe the water is wires and we just cannot see. Progress is coming faster than we can really see, but at the same time, it is still so far behind and we think it's more advanced than it really is.