Sustained Investigation #2

The main idea that guided this piece of art was my inquiry question "what could the future relationship between man and machine look like?" Specifically, I wanted to explore a relationship in a dystopian setting that was not man vs. machine but rather a man with machine. Dystopia is one of my favorite genres in fiction but almost every time the "dystopia" aspect of the story is a creation, physical or social, that humans created that came back to bite them. In this piece, I left the nature of the dystopia rather vague. Instead, I wanted the true focus to be on a bittersweet relationship between and man and machine helping one another out in that dystopian world, no matter what the cause may have been. In this piece, the man and machine keep each other company and keep each other alive shone by them exchanging parts the other needs. Even though this may seem like a good thing there is the nuance that the world they inhabit is horrible and the human is well passed their time, as shown by them literally being a walking skeleton. Both continue to live on, struggling to stay afloat, clinging onto life, being the odds of survival in a brutal wasteland, so they can remain friends forever. 

This was a project that required a lot of material, including some I haven't really worked with before, despite knowing how I wanted to create this piece. I bought some of the supplies like wire, popsicle sticks, clay, and gears from Johan's Fabricks. But everything else like hot glue, tin foil, safety pins, scrap, and paint I had lying around within all the art supplies I'v been hoarding in my closet for years (whoops). The first thing I built was the body of the human, first by creating a metal framework and then figuring out where to add clay to add form and detail. I sculpted the clay around the framework and then backed the whole thing in the oven, I then secured them to each other together with hot glue. Then I made the ground out of a square of popsicle sticks wrapped in tin foil. I then built the body of the robot out of hot glue and popsicle sticks, then added paint. After that, I made the head, brain, and arms of the human and face, arms, and plaiting of the robot. Finally, when I thought the project was done, I kept coming back over and over to add small details to add more personality and meaning behind the piece. Overall I learned alot about working with 3D design elements from this project, expeshely wire wich I found nearly impossible at the beginning but quickly learned how to use.

This was a piece with a lot of specific artistic decisions behind it in order to show meaning. The human being a walking skeleton represents how they are far past their time but still manage to cling to life through the help of their friend the robot and artificial means. This includes the glass lung which is the only detail left over from my original sketch of this project, that being someone with a glass lung with plants inside of it in a world where the air quality is unbreathable. In the final piece, you can see the robot bringing a new lung with vibrant plants in it to the human whose current lung is mostly dead things on the inside. You can also see right through the human's head to look at their half-robotic brain, another part of themselves that has been preserved. On the other hand, or in the other hand literally, the human is holding a safety pin that is a replacement part for the robot's broken arm segment. Other details were added on spontaneously but I tried to have them mean something. Including things like adding the text 1BF to the side of the robot standing for #1 best friend or only friend depending on how you interpret it, the humans hear being a gear and the robot having a red "human" heart, the mushrooms on the ground being a different color than the ones in the bottles, having the human place their hand on the robot in a friendly gesture, and singing my name by wringing it on part of the rubel of the ground to naturally incorporate it into the piece.