The piece more or less got its start through my desire to make use of my growing collection of vacuum tubes.  You will see these turn up in a lot of sculptures, but most artists tend to leave them non-functioning.  I really wanted to have the tubes glowing with some kind of implied intelligence, so this little figure was conjured up.  As you can see above I had an entirely different environment originally planned for him.

One of the things that was most enjoyable about making Under the Sea was the prop design aspect of making the miniature control equipment.  This process also allows me to watch tons of old crappy sci-fi movies and call it “research”.  For this piece I devised a sort of main computer terminal.  It features a oversize lever that is motor driven to make the figure appear to operate it.  I took particular satisfaction in the piece of chandelier glass mounted to distort the light from an LED against an old film editing screen.  The effect is very 1970’s future tech.

Perhaps the biggest challenge was creating a convincing interior environment that could still be installed and removed from the doll clothes locker that I chose for the container of this piece.  I wound up building a plywood box in two sections, then disassembling it and applying a layer of walnut veneer to give it a continuous feel.  You can see the stereo VU meters, gas meter, erector set parts etc that went into the additional details.

I was able to get the little dials on the gas meter to spin by way of a little motor, and the needles on the VU meters jump and light up.  I chose an old illustration of the Earth as seen from the Moon from a science magazine to be the view out the “rear window” of the vessel.

I’ll post final images and video in the next few weeks.