The tiny leftover electronic toy parts that Tim gave me represent both a very hard and at the same time very easy and fun object to turn into an artwork. It was hard because it didn’t look like anything – it had literally lost its entire outer form when its Styrofoam corpus had been smashed to bits by the kids playing with it. The easy part was that the few remaining parts had a function, and that always makes conversion easy. The tiny box had batteries in it, and if one pressed a small button, three LEDs started blinking in different colours.
But without an outer shell and shape these charming lights would be invested with very little meaning. The solution came to me as I was browsing a Dollar Store, something I do a lot for finding useful and cheap parts for my creations. There they were, a small forgotten and neglected stack of local sights, lovingly cast in plastic somewhere in China. For some reason, the sights they were offering was the Jefferson memorial and the Pentagon!? Do people go and look at the Pentagon and take selfies of themselves in front of it? Does it even look five sided from the front? I mean, to get the friends and family back home to recognized that one was posing with Pentagon in the background, wouldn’t one have to do the thing from a helicopter or something, which I am sure the CIA would sort of object to. Anyway, enough trying to second guess Chinese trinket designers, for me it offered an excellent solution.
So, with a bit of drilling and carving and gluing, I quickly fitted the LEDs inside the model, and attached a nice big red button to it for easier use. Tickling the button now triggers the alert! The best part is that the three LEDs all blink in different colours, all responding to their own proper Defcon: Blue for Just take it easy Man, Green for Hmm, maybe time to get dressed and get ready for work, and Red for I’m gonna smash your face in you M….F…r!
The tiny leftover electronic toy parts that Tim gave me represent both a very hard and at the same time very easy and fun object to turn into an artwork. It was hard because it didn’t look like anything – it had literally lost its entire outer form when its Styrofoam corpus had been smashed to bits by the kids playing with it. The easy part was that the few remaining parts had a function, and that always makes conversion easy. The tiny box had batteries in it, and if one pressed a small button, three LEDs started blinking in different colours.
But without an outer shell and shape these charming lights would be invested with very little meaning. The solution came to me as I was browsing a Dollar Store, something I do a lot for finding useful and cheap parts for my creations. There they were, a small forgotten and neglected stack of local sights, lovingly cast in plastic somewhere in China. For some reason, the sights they were offering was the Jefferson memorial and the Pentagon!? Do people go and look at the Pentagon and take selfies of themselves in front of it? Does it even look five sided from the front? I mean, to get the friends and family back home to recognized that one was posing with Pentagon in the background, wouldn’t one have to do the thing from a helicopter or something, which I am sure the CIA would sort of object to. Anyway, enough trying to second guess Chinese trinket designers, for me it offered an excellent solution.
So, with a bit of drilling and carving and gluing, I quickly fitted the LEDs inside the model, and attached a nice big red button to it for easier use. Tickling the button now triggers the alert! The best part is that the three LEDs all blink in different colours, all responding to their own proper Defcon: Blue for Just take it easy Man, Green for Hmm, maybe time to get dressed and get ready for work, and Red for I’m gonna smash your face in you M….F…r!
The reason I like it that my Pentagon blinks in three different colours at the same time, is that it emphasizes the subjectivity of the many departments and individuals within the intelligence community. Things like alert levels or terror threats are always presented as if they were objectively measurable values, but really, aren’t they tinkered together with a lot of quick phone calls and meetings between policy makers and experts, all of them arguing for their own interpretation of signs and sightings of the enemy?