y is for yoyo

here's another sculpture project i made for school. the project had to be about language. which covers a huge range of possibilities. yeah, that's a speak n spell. i found it for $ .25 at a neighbors garage sale. they said it worked, but my dad (who's basically mr. fix-it) and i tried a couple different times to get it to work using various methods and his voltameter. but so far it hasn't worked. (but i save the circuit board, just in case). anywho, so the speak and spell in this piece doesn't actually work. but, i had a circuit board from a toy school bus that i was going to circuit bend, but it kept dieing and i kept thinking i'd ruined it, so it never got circuit bent. so that's the thing on the big yellow shape on the right of the piece. and if you touch the orange and red squares on the circuits, it will make noise. the school bus had an alphabet, so it says stuff like "a is for apple, b is for bird..." it also says stuff like, "this is a tree, it's color is green", and i forget what else. it's in this song

the big blue arrow shows where the start/on circuit is. the blue box is a slide box and contains a couple slides i found at a rummage sale at the church i went to as a kid. there's a bear one, and one of an old car, and some other animal ones. the weird black thing in the middle is where the batteries go. and the green thing is the circuit board, it connects on the left to the speaker that's in the speak n spell. it's hard to see (i'll borrow a better camera and get some close ups sometime), but there's a slide viewer at the top right of the speak n spell. and you look through this lens, and it magnifies the slide in the viewer. and you're like "hey, it's a bear". i put a light that shines through the dark grey plastic of the speak n spell (where the words would show up, if it actually worked) and it helps light up the slide so you can look at it. you can change the slides, and if you find the right circuit there's also twinkley lights that come on for a few seconds.

so yeah, it was hard to figure out, and make it work as a design, and my dad helped me with some of the planning, cuz we tried a lot of different ways to make things work the best. i guess the sad part of it is, the silver on the circuit board scratches super easily, so when i showed it in class, it worked intermittantly, and i think it's also not very clear to the viewer how to get it to work. so if it was ever in a gallery setting, it would maybe be confusing, but i love the idea of interactive stuff. (Bill Will is an amazing artist who uses motion sensors a lot with his art, i've tried to find info and pictures of his work, but i haven't found much... i'll look again. i saw his show at the art gym at marylhurst a 2 years ago or so. it was amazing.) so i guess the challange is to make things that aren't easily breakable, and to make them clearer (or at least more easy to figure out, even if it is a little bit of a puzzle) and yeah. i love the idea of sounds and re-inventing kids toys like that. it was fun to make, i love the colors, but i need to re glue a lot of the hot glue and find a place to hang it in my room where it will be safe.

it's about language, but it's kind of jumbled. like what if kids toys taught them the wrong way to spell stuff? and i never had a speak and spell, i learned to spell by having spelling quizes, and i had to study for them, and i remember my grandma helping me study sometimes, and my mom did too. oh speaking of spelling, i like the bad spellers. they're from tokyo.