trivia bot-
2009 – 2010 – 3’ tall, 3’ long, 18” wide
silicone, rubber, aluminum, hardware, sound circuitry, sensors, code, micro-controllers, amplifiers, speakers.
Thinking about the oceans of useless knowledge and stimuli we get hit with every day, I decided to build a kind of anthropomorphic embodiment of a useless trivia machine. Equal parts manic, mis-programmed walking machine, and over-talkative object that refused to leave the viewer alone.
I recorded a voice loop of trivia that got activated as the viewer went near the piece.
The result was a vaguely caricaturish blue rubber robot that never walked properly, limping awkwardly, or hanging helplessly, its little aluminum stick legs waving in mid-air.
It wasn’t till I finished casting the blue rubber body that I realized that the little avatar was an internalized form of the visual culture I grew up with. As a kid I took in all the foreign pop and seeing no difference between saints, demons, the Easter bunny, topo gigio, Ultraman, Godzilla or el Chavo del ocho. None of them originated in my city. Though they fascinated me, I couldn’t separate santa claus or jesus from the malevolent radioactive octopi of my favorite japanese cartoons. To this day there is an equivalency in this internal landscape.
They’re loaded images, and I’ll always love maximalism because of the codes of absurdity and complexity it embraces… but they’re misplaced for this, since trivia is the tonnage of stimuli that washes up on the shores of our attention spans every minute of every day.
The second ‘robot’ I ever tried to build, still had the naive optimism of someone who’s only ever scratched the surface of basic code snippets, circuit construction, wiring and testing simple sensors; to say nothing of machining couplers, mounts and so on.
I’d never dealt with electrical noise, short circuits, burnt-out motors, heavy Sealed-Lead-Acid batteries and so on. The second time I exhibited the motor controller over-heated and started smoking.
I learned a lot, mainly that I had a lot more to learn before I could commit to exhibiting my work in a public space full of other people’s work. A robot was kind of like an old unreliable car needing constant maintenance. Even careful planning and testing don’t offer a guarantee against motor-failure, communication failure or other unpredictable breakdowns.
In any case, this was also the moment when I was completely hooked, I decided to lock myself away and hunker down to figure things out. It seemed to me that robots were 3-D avatars that could communicate embody some of the narratives and paranoias of humans… in a way they were the very opposite of online bots.
Excerpt of recorded trivia
I trawled far and wide for trivia on everything from chickens, to sports, in antique children’s encyclopedias, legal tomes, and the internet… and came up with a mixed bag…
There are more insects in a single square mile of fertile soil than there are people on the entire earth.
There are more bacteria and microbes in our body than actual cells that make up the body.
An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
The first pinball machine game was the “whoope game” in 1930 built by the In and Outdoor game company of Chicago
There is enough fuel in a full tank of a jumbo jet to drive an average car around the world four times.
The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year.
Gallium is a metal which would melt on the palm of your hand, because its melting point is only (29.76 °C)
Starfish don’t have brains.
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the pioneer of custom hotrods, believes that hot rod culture was ruined by the Beatles, because kids spent all their money on records and began using garages for band practice.
And… did you know… that… Elephants can hear through their feet?
The adult heart pumps about 7,500 litres of blood every day.
Thomas Wedders, the English circus freak, had a nose which was seven and a half inches long.
The blue whale can produce the loudest sound produced by an animal – up to 188 decibels – and detected as far away as 853 kms (530mi).
If Mount Everest were placed at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, its peak would still be a mile underwater.
The planet Saturn has a density lower than water… So, if you could place it in water it would float.
Ghengis Khan’s cavalry invented powdered milk! They’d milk their horses and dry it in the sun and carry it with them in all their raids and campaigns.
If you shrunk a car to the size of a roach, the roach could outrun the car. Roaches can run about 200 scale miles per hour.
The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.
There’s no rats in Alberta.
The safety pin was invented by Walter Hunt of New York City on April 10, 1849. It took him three hours from when he thought of it, to making one and trying it out.
Chewing gum was invented by a dentist, named William Semple – as a way to exercise your jaws.
In 1650 Archbishop James Ussher calculated that the exact moment of Creation to be: at nightfall, Saturday 22 October, 4004 BC.
There weren’t rats in Iceland till the seventeenth century.
The lightning bolt is 3 times hotter than the sun.
