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Monday, November 15, 2004

We Built This City 2

Inspiration

Okay, Plastonia didn't just spring into existence overnight. There were other projects that led to its creation (and I was playing a lot of SimCity 2 at the time).



I Believe I Can Flllllllyyyyyiiieeeeee!
Here's one of the first projects I worked on as the "arts specialist". We built a huge landscape on the wall (it's actually tilted 90 degrees in this pic), hung stretched out cotton as clouds and took a video camera and recorded "flight" videos over it. It was our low-tech flight simulator.

Sludge Tank
This project inspired the mining activity. We had bags and bags of plaster at our disposal, so building an underwater landscape seemed like a good idea. The kids & I built this huge basin out of coloured plaster with windows built in the sides so we could fill it with water and look in.

When it was done, we discovered that 1) the plaster made the water murky and we couldn't see anything, and 2) it had lots of cracks and holes, so water leaked out everywhere and made a huge mess. But that's the creative process, right? Clumsy, messy, a bit nuts ... I feel a rant coming on ...

That's one of the things that pisses me off about the Macintosh Computer Cult. One of the tenents of that bizarre religion is that creativity is linked to cleanliness, simplicity and minimalism. Which is a complete load o' the crap -- that sort of thinking implicitly raises design above art and is a bias based on a twisted sales model, not reality.

The reality of the creative process is the Sludge Tank. A sloppy half-disaster. It has to be that way because that's how the happy accidents happen, when different elements accidentally get mixed together to make something new.

Apply these complaints to condo design culture, Saturn car marketing and Indigo books. In the mainstream, clean, dull design has been elevated to the status of being one "the finer things in life" and art, well, it's been sent to the back of the bus.

Um, the following year we broke down the basin and used chunks of it to add mass to the kids' mines.

Lumbertown
Logs, logs, logs! At the sounds of the falling tree ...

This city was just a simple sculpture project. We took a sheet of plywood (about 1.5m x 1.5m) and built a city on it with painted wood blocks. It was just for fun, there was no simulation or game.

In fact, we did it in the summer, outdoors in the park sitting under a tree. We might have been listening to Journey. At least that's how I choose to remember it.

Coming up: Tales from Plastonia
 

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