Break It To Make It

Hacked and modded Talking View-Master.

In the world of "Hacks & Mods," my efforts are rather unsophisticated. In case these words haven't made an appearance on your buzz-word radar yet, they refer to the practice of hacking, modifying, and sometimes "circuit bending" existing electronic hardware (usually off-the-shelf consumer stuff) in attempt to improve, or completely change the intended use of an item. While most of the hack & mod crowd are weekend hobbyists and seekers of whiz-bang novelty, there is a strident political stance to the efforts of many of the more advanced and experimental practitioners. You don't have to poke around their sites for very long before you notice a certain "anti-establishment" tone to a lot of the posts. Hacks are shared freely in an deliberate attempt to undermine the corporate control of technology and to democratize the re-engineered results. These folks believe strongly in freeing up technology and giving creative control to the little guy. Never mind most of us little guys wouldn't know what to do with that creative control. Program a Roomba to fetch a martini?  

Somewhere along this continuum between science fair tinkerers and revolutionary super nerds, you'll find a growing crowd of artists who practice hacking and modding. My own projects have centered on store-bought toys that were "re-imagined" or commandeered for alternative uses. This sort of re-contextualizing of objects is an extension of the kind of thinking that goes into my paintings. A couple of years ago I did a piece for Dana Cain's Love Show that involved a talking plush toy that I modded to read Craigslist "Missed Connections" in a monotone computer voice to gallery visitors.

Lonesome Bear reads Craigslist personals to gallery visitors

My latest project involves an old Talking View-Master that I found in a junk shop on Colfax. It came with a set of reels, which included a 3-D tour of the first Apollo moon landing in 1969. To my delight, when I got home I discovered it still works. Each Talking View-Master reel comes with a tiny clear plastic record attached, which spins at 78 RPM, containing a separate recorded message for each of the slides on the reel. When the user presses a button, a stylus engages the record, and the message plays over a tinny speaker inside the viewer.

 Record is clear so that light may pass through to slides.

I had this thing for over a year before it occurred to me that I should punk it. I began to imagine the bland 70's audio narration set to a spacey dub track. So I began trying to figure out how to digitize the sound on the little records, then "re-mix" it with a hi quality stereo audio track, and finally get it back onto the Talking View-Master. The thing was going to need a digital audio player, some decent headphones, and a reengineered front panel. The result is what you see here.

Before and after

I hollowed out the View-Master of all it's unnecessary hardware, this included the motor, stylus and speaker assembly. When modding, you often have to decide whether or not to permanently disable a feature or function in order to accommodate some new use. This decision can sometimes border on the philosophical, like whether or not to spray-paint some sad old piece of furniture that came down through your family. In my case, I needed room inside the View-Master to embed a digital audio player, some circuitry for the headphones and a charging mechanism. This meant my lovely 40 year old toy would lose much of its pure vintage charm, and all of its antique value. Fortunately, you can still find Talking View-Masters on Ebay. And for those of you lucky enough to already have one, its value just increased by some infinitesimal amount since I just removed mine from the available pool of functioning antique toys! So be it.

This tweaked View-Master now joins the suite of space exploration-related artworks that I've been creating over the past several years. It will be available for playing at the Pangloss Gravitron party at Emmanuel Gallery on August 15th, and during the Artist's Talk on August 29th.

If you don't make it to the show, here is a link to the audio remix I did of the View-Master moon-landing narration. Enjoy.