As an artist, I am not usually fond of collaborating, but this week I find myself working with a good friend on a project for our Puppets and Prosthetics class. So far it’s been a hilarious adventure of things just not working out.
The assignment: Giants and Miniatures
The idea: To use a microscope with projection capabilities to tell microscopic narratives about big world events/ disasters with a focus on insignificant participants.
To be fair, we really thought this was going to work, even if we were blinded by the sheer brilliance of our idea. The problem is, even a kid’s $7 thrift-store-purchase microscope really does mean microscopic, and that’s kind of hard to replicate by hand, no matter how dedicated an artist you are.
Nevertheless, we persisted. Using the smallest pen point we had, we drew ridiculously small city scenes and under the sea atmospheres. On slide covers we drew tiny creatures. And it almost worked- almost.
The scene is, me and Meg huddled in her bathroom holding a microscope against a wall moving the light around to try and get any image,anything at all, to show up. Jiggling parts, attempting the substitution of a flashlight, and overall desperate giggling. In the background, the shower drips continually as if in mocking of us chasing our dream. I believe at this point we could have had it; the background, once projected, was blocky and large, but it was surreal and satisfactory in a dream-like way. Did we have the patience to shoot a stop motion through the lens of a microscope? Even if we could have figured out the right focus, the answer still would have been a clear no. We decided we could project the background through the microscope and use paper puppets against the wall. But the projection just wasn’t strong enough, and we were beginning to push the justification for the actual use of the microscope once we removed the puppets from magnification.
As much as we were in love with our microscope, we knew we had to move on. Good ideas don’t always work no matter how many pagan rituals you are willing to perform to see success. So we spent the next twenty minutes calling around for magnifying glasses, which apparently are just called magnifiers these days. Go figure. There still hasn’t been a resolution, but it has certainly been interesting to improvise so much on a vision shared with another person. Like Edison, we don’t see our failure as true failure, but as a lesson in pushing us forward to the right solution.
