I stayed up late in the studio last night with this as one of many motivational songs that really explains how it all works the night before a due date.
And here is the final piece, which I totally forgot to take a picture of on a model. But it is based on Pac-man and the idea of level 256 where the arcade game glitches out, hence that large 3D mutated Pac-man with wires and Parcheesi pieces "power pills" coming out of its mouth. This part also sits on the back of the back of the neck so that the piece is all normal looking in the front until you walk around to the back where there is the wild and crazy thing. It is also a box clasp type closure that mostly works, yay for beginner's luck on that one!
I'm fairly satisfied with it, so far as it came out exactly as I had planned it to, but there are little quirks about it that bug me, mostly under neath the heading of craftsmanship. Still it's on to the next which is proving to be harder to design than I thought it would be...
This post has been percolating for at least two weeks for your enjoyment; since I keep having to revise it again and again because so many art projects became due all at once. First the fun stuff: somehow I came across this link to a 87 minute documentary on hulu called Chasing Ghosts: Beyond The Arcade. Though not the best documentary, it did explain to me a lot about Twin Galaxies, Walter Day's desire to keep track of arcade high scores, and a good portion of where are they now for the guys who had the top scores.
Through the interviews you get a sense of what the arcade culture was like and their perspective on how and why it died so abruptly (Home gaming surpassing the arcade as well as rougher clientele showing up to arcades). It's still difficult to imagine what arcades were like having missed that entire period of video gaming history but virtue of having been born in the 90s, but it sounds awesome.
While not "researching" games I have been camping out in the studio working on a few things and completing things at a rate that feels way too slow at times.
CAD class at least is quite fun and I completed the first project a while ago, which is this sweet wind up robot. I thought I was on to something different with my color scheme, but alas looking around the Internet there is at least one retro tin wind up robot with the same green, red, and yellow. At least the design is different, toy makers and sci-fi filmmakers didn't base too many robots on an egg shape (Robbie the Robot comes closest).
Next is ceramics, which is still not a favorite medium of mine. The left is a coil built vessel with red and black slip with sgrafitto in it, post improvements. My snake pot came out of the raku firing well (middle picture) but it didn't clean up as well as I would have liked (right picture) the snake was supposed to be a blue-green, but I guess I didn't slap on enough layers of glaze. At least it looks kinda ancient? Anyway on to Metalsmithing...
Where my angle raised vessel is almost the shape I want it so I can start worrying about building the base and ordering some super special awesome materials for it. I got a good start on the catenoid, though I get the feeling I'm doing it wrong, judging by the interesting blisters I some how gave my self hammering it and the charming surface cracks it developed. It's now a gamble as to how complete this will be by the due date since I have been focusing most of my time on jewelry.
I have the chain together and I just got the clasp soldered together last night. Tonight I have to round up some two part epoxy in order to add my last minute decorative doodads to the clasp. The cheese grater holes inside Pac-man's mouth will have a rats nest of colorful wires glued in; left over from when I dismantled three Genesis controllers to make a little model chair for intro to 3D Design. The big copper loop will get a cut in it so I can string on wooden Parcheesi pieces, spaced out by brass tubing, which will also conveniently cover the break in the wire.
Now provided I don't get distracted by attempting to beat lousy and unusual games in the the Pac-man franchise or by such paltry thing as sleep or dinner I should be able to finally finish this necklace and get on to designing the VR glasses.
Our first project for this class is to have a chain of some sort, with the clasp as the focal point. And as you may guess I'm basing this one on Pac-man. You may also be wondering then why I didn't title this post Pac-Mania or something similar, but we'll get to that in a moment. First some back story though.
Long time readers know I went to a CAD workshop last year hosted at the college, and came up with an abstract Pac-shape that I reeeeeeally wanted to use at the time but didn't quite have time to dwell on it. Now that I have mulled over it for a while my plan is thus:
I'll start by loosely riveting flat brass Pac-men eye to power pill. Since it will be a necklace I can't really paint the metal bright colors like I originally wanted, since the friction will likely wear it away. I may break up the monotony of the chain with blue Pente or Parcheesi pieces as a reference to to the color of the maze, ghosts, and as a more visible pellet.
The clasp however will be a big 3D Pac-man sitting on the back of the neck. Not only will it reference the transition in to three dimensional games in the late 90s/early 00s it will also represent the 256th level of the original arcade Pac-man from 1982. Wikipedia explains what happens on that level better than I can:
"Pac-Man was designed to have no ending – as long as the player keeps at least one life, he or she should be able to play the game indefinitely. However, a bug keeps this from happening: Normally, no more than seven fruit are displayed at the bottom of the screen at any one time. But when the internal level counter, which is stored in a single byte, reaches 255, the subroutine that draws the fruit erroneously "rolls over" this number to zero, causing it to try to draw 256 fruit instead of the usual seven. This corrupts the bottom of the screen and the entire right half of the maze with seemingly random symbols, making it impossible to eat enough dots to beat the level. Because this effectively ends the game, this "split-screen" level is often referred to as the "kill screen". Emulators and code analysis have revealed what would happen should this 255th level be cleared: The fruit and intermissions would restart at level 1 conditions, but the enemies would retain their higher speed and invulnerability to power pellets from the higher stages."
And this is what it looks like. Therefore my clasp will be an unrecognizable barely Pac-mannish shape, all glitched and distorted. Exactly how I'm not sure yet, but there's still a little bit of time to decide on that. All in all I'm actually looking forward to this project more than usual, goes to show what a good theme can do for generating ideas. For the immediate moment of this post there's no where to go except to drag up some relics from 1982 and the height of Pac-man (and arcade) fever starting of course with the Buckner & Garica song:
