HELLO AND GOODBYE ROBOT

I went upstairs to my studio with no idea of what I was looking for. I didn't want a plan for building my robot, it had to emerge of its own accord.

A stained old rubber glove caught my eye and said: start with me. So I picked it up and the next steps immediately followed. I realised that the robot doesn't have to look like a robot. It's robotic, yes, but lives inside my mind so it can look like whatever its playback activity looks like.

I stuffed the glove with cotton wool and fitted it over a plastic pot. Then I saw that the fingers were saying something so I cut circles out of card, wrote the words on them and attached the circles to the fingers with bits of wire. Finally, the hand said that it needed an image and I knew right away what it wanted: the crying baby, one of the drawings for my graphic novel-in-progress. I cut out and pasted a small scan of it onto the rubber glove hand. Robot finished, I took photos of it from different angles and here they are for your amusement.

You may not believe this but I kid you not. This absurd concotion which is not, repeat NOT a work of art but a utility, has fulfilled its purpose. It has lost its robot power and is merely a thing which I will smile at now and then. Try the experiment yourself and see what happens.