Coin Operated Shade O' Sphere

This large image is a cross section of a plan for a massive machine that draws spheres.  It  is a composite of photographs of machine-like items taken from around my house.   Keeping things in my house is sort of an unwritten rule I have made for my art during Covid….  Of course, I could go other places to shoot, but I like creating rules for my art…its part of the fun.  It’s my belief that creativity springs from reacting to rules and constraints.  When one is an art student one’s teachers provide these with the projects they give out.  However, I think that after that, most artists create their own rules and limitations to structure their work.  We/they might not call it that, instead using words like style, technique, approach, interests, preferred subject matter, theme, etc.
 
This image is about transparency, which I mentioned in the last blog post.  That is, its about the difference between seeing how something works and being able to make it work—and the idea that how we define this word seems to have changed.  To illustrate this I have created a transparent machine that draws spheres.  It is transparent in the contemporary sense of the word because you can see that all you need to do is put one of my monopoly plug coins in to the coin receptacle and make sure the latex intake is filled with rubber gloves.  It is not transparent because you can see all the workings.  In fact these workings are clearly nonsensical.  However, consider this: for most of us so are the inner workings of much of the technology we use in modern life.  We just need to trust that the experts know what they are doing.
 
I chose to design this machine to do a ridiculous task.  The idea here is that it can draw spheres for you so that you will no longer need to do it yourself.  Of course, the only people who draw spheres are usually those who are learning how to draw. Drawing them is usually not a means in and of itself.  It would be like creating a push-up-doing machine (hmmm….) that does your push ups for you.   Such a machine might get your push ups done but it won’t make you stronger.  Or, it could be like a book reading machine that will read your text books for you…etc. In fact, I imagine that I would make this machine available to my students so they can use it to draw the spheres required in my introductory drawing classes.  They save time and tedious shading practice while I make a tidy little profit (maybe like when a professor puts his/her book on the required reading list…its not an exact comparison).
 
In any case, this large undertaking has given me a number of other ideas for machines that play on the concept of transparency and are aimed at achieving goals with limited value.  However I have to admit they will be smaller…editing this was a tedious undertaking and it made me wish I had a “Plan for a Cross Section of a Coin Operated Shade O’ Sphere Photoshop Editing Machine” to have done it for me.