"User Friendly" - woodblock print

This woodblock print is titled “User Friendly”. It features three robots playing around with a human. Each robot is from a different point in time and space. The robot on the right is the future robot with an advanced design and telescoping arms. The one in the center is an alien design robot with tentacles and a single optical sensor. Finally, the robot on the left is the retro robot that relies on moving gears for internal mechanics and has outdated optical sensors and limited maneuverability. The retro robot is also the robot that’s featured on my first robot print, “Urban Robo”.

I wanted to make a piece that made the robots look more like children than towering monsters. Sure they’re enormous and emotionless, but they’re also limited in their memory capacity, and were created to help humans in their menial tasks. Basically they’re harmless, but they are large and curious, they think they’re helping us, but they don’t comprehend death or realize if they’re causing harm, making them dangerous.

The design for the print started out as a pencil sketch, and was redrawn on a large sheet of sketchpad paper, and transferred onto the woodblock with tracing paper.

The hatching in the background first seen in the “Urban Robo” print returns to not only continue the design in the first one, making it apparent that they’re part of an ongoing series, but also retain the original purpose of breaking up the large amount of flat black color surrounding the composition.

In the Future: The iPad

In the future people will look at the ancient, bulky iPad, and question what they were thinking. It’s a huge thing in our time, it will probably become an icon of this era, and serve as a precursor that will lead the way to all the wondrous devices in the future, but it will become obsolete in the future, to the point that it becomes humorous. People will make sitcoms that take place during 2010, a truly wacky time in their eyes. They will write in a character that has just purchased the iPad, and is completely overwhelmed by its capabilities. The audience will laugh at the enthusiastic character as he reads the specs on the back of the box. “A sixteen gigabyte hard drive, 3G wireless internet”, it’s a dinosaur compared to the devices the people watching the show all have at the time. We, however, will buy one from a garage sale to recount memories of days gone by, a simpler time where you didn’t need a cybernetic implant to read the newspaper, which you’ll be able to read on your toaster, if you could figure out how it works. When we show our grandchildren the iPad, they’re eyes will open wide in amazement. They’ll ask if people really held that thing in their hands when browsing the internet, and we will blow their minds by telling them that people used to sit down when they used computers.

"Downloading" - Intaglio

I got this idea one day to try to do something similar to the Matrix movies, where they plug people into the computer via a port in the back of the persons head, or how they download information and memories form suspects in Ghost in the Shell. Basically I wanted to do a piece featuring a woman having information being downloaded into her mind via cybernetic implant. However, I wanted it to look a little lower tech than the other two so I gave the woman a helmet with a bunch of wires coming out of it. Sort of like the old mind transfer machines that mad scientists would invent in old television shows. In order to push the idea that information was being downloaded into her mind I ran the words down and loading through her eyes, like they were flashing on a screen in her head or something. I also thought it made her look like a cyborg.

The method I used for this piece was intaglio; it’s a form of etching, and one of the older forms of printmaking.

This is the plate that I make the prints with. The process for doing an intaglio piece is pretty interesting, involving acid to etch the lines you draw into the plate, making a recess to hold the ink in.

It’s still a work in progress, as you can see additional line hatching was drawn in later to add more value. I’m still currently working on the piece, removing lines from the composition, which is a whole nother process called scraping and burnishing.

What is Ctrl+Alt+Robot?

Control+Alt+Robot is the label under witch my artwork falls under. Pieces that fall under this label all include the theme of human nature merging with computer technology. I intend to use my art to push the line between natural and artificial; humanity and technology, merging the two until they become symbiotic and perverse, while still attaining an eerie sense of familiarity.

We seem to be able to live along with technology. We use it everyday, but we aren’t dependant on it, are we? At what point do we lose control of what we’ve created, and it starts to control us? What if we integrated technology into our lives to the point that we needed it to survive, or even function normally? What if we came to the point where we would question who was human any more, or what it even meant to be human? Where’s the line that says we’ve crossed from human into something beyond, or better?

I intend to use this blog to showcase my latest works, older works, random doodles and comics. This blog will give me the opportunity to discus and explain my works, inspirations, muses and ideals. The images I will display on this blog belong to me, and should be considered copyrighted, unless stated otherwise.