Past Imperfect is the working title for an exhibition I am slowly planning.
Here's the backstory:
I do like watching shows about people driving around and rummaging through old homes and barns, finding and buying old stuff. All those "pickers" shows and other related programs.
I also like reading fiction, in particular science fiction, and a few of the novels I have read propose the "multiverse" theory. "There are other worlds than these" and so on. King, Koontz, Pratchett and Baxter have all done this. Some of them have used potatoes.
Now then, imagine if a couple of pickers could travel from one universe in the multiverse to another to go picking. If they could just take a "step to the left" and go one world over, pick a few old barns and come back with things that never existed here.
Things that could not have existed here as the technology for them was not around over here at the time they were made over there back then.
Or words to that effect.
With all this in mind, I am starting to build "punk" old artefacts that were picked from another world. You have seen the construct I am building, why I am building it has escaped me for a while. It was inspired by the constructs in "Perdido Street Station" (my favourite novel) and now I look at it, well it could have been picked off the junk pile a world over and brought back here. So the "Sher Flora-bot, model E22" is the first item for the exhibition.
Here is something else underway:
and
This started as a scale model punk racer, but now I realise it is in fact an old children's pull along toy based on a real race car from one world over. This will be the "Trenchfield Trundler" special edition. I will find an old wooden crate for it and mock up an old torn faded paper label for the crate.
Other items I have in mind to construct for this exhibition are the "Parleyphone" (Early video phone) a couple of children's toy robots (based on real life domestic constructs) and a motorised mono-cycle/unicycle type machine.
The idea is to build everything to look as functional as possible, and as domestic as possible. The cast offs and detritus of a time past in a different place.
More soon ...
