Now its finished, its clear that the idea of ‘Travel by
Tube’ came from the recent adverts on London’s tube trains with large
text saying ‘STARING’ and more recently also ‘PRESSING’ or ‘TOUCHING’.
While the intention is to avoid distressing sexual advances the ads are also
scarily ‘big brother’. Apart from the impossibility of proving this sort
of thing, I found it personally disturbing because I really enjoy looking at
other people on the tube. Such a rich variety, its always fascinating. When
I was a cartoonist and needed inspiration for new characters, I would often
travel by tube to find an interesting character to study closely – trying
not to stare too obviously. I would then get off and draw them from memory
on the platform when they were fresh in my mind. They weren’t exactly
portraits, just details that captured something of what had interested me in
their character.
However, though I’d been thinking about these new ads,
which mainly made me feel old and out of touch, it never occurred to me that
they could be the subject of the next arcade machine. Travel by Tube
actually had a completely different starting point. For a while I’ve been
bothered how complicated my arcade machines have become. I can’t seem to
resist adding ‘bells and whistles’ – even though people enjoy my
earlier simpler machines just as much. So this year I set myself the task of
making something simple. As a kid I loved a series of books called the ‘Wonderbooks’.
In particular I loved the flyleaves. The front flyleaf depicts some idyllic
scene and the rear one shows every element of the same scene descended into
chaos. Revisiting the originals I found they weren’t nearly as good as I
remembered them, but I still thought 3d versions of a scene flipping into
chaos had potential, particularly with audio to build up the suspense before
the flip. I tried a building site with Health and Safety inspectors who all
met with disasters but wasn’t happy with it. Then I thought maybe
different elements of a scene could flip independently. Or that the initial
scene should have two alternative outcomes. The basic problem though was
that I just couldn’t find a suitable subject that really gripped me.
Wonderbook front flyleaf
Wonderbook back flyleaf
So I was stuck. I’d spent the winter making videos (more
Secret Lives of Components). Though delighted by their enthusiastic
reception, I’m not a natural film maker. After making five hour long
episodes I really needed to stop and make something physical – anything
really. Fortunately desperation is the mother of invention so I soon found a
starting point. While worrying how to fit three scenes for alternative
outcomes in a small box, I’d made a mock-up which had the shape of a tube
train.
This was the moment I realised the weird new ads in an
animated Tube train could be good territory. Travelling by tube is a part of
everyday life most people take for granted but I find it rich, fascinating
and often weird. If I lived in London I guess it would lose its novelty, but
I only come about about once a fortnight, enough of a gap for the experience
to remain fresh. One of weird things about the new ads is that they ignore
much more common uncomfortable situations.
The most common embarrassing moment on the tube is when a
beggar gets on. Like almost everyone else I avert my eyes and ignore them. I
wish I didn’t, but have found it really hard not to. I think its the fear
of being picked on even though its very unlikely. Anyway its certainly an
awkward and people don’t talk about it much. The opposite happens when
dogs or particularly puppies get on. Passengers turn to look and often even
start talking to each other.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
For my automata passengers, the challenge was to find body
movements that could express both attraction and repulsion by them moving in
opposite directions. I made a rough prototype in a couple of days and then
tried filming it as stop motion animation. I didn’t really like the result
and almost abandoned the whole idea until I added the sounds of a real tube
train. Somehow this transformed it and this gave me the confidence to spend
three months making the final thing.
Prototype video
The final characters on the train aren’t portraits of any
particular individuals. Each one is a mix of many people I’ve observed,
selecting elements that fit carvings on this small scale. I carved the first
ones out of Jellutong, a wood with wonderfully straight grain but not much
harder than Balsa wood. I then switched to Lime wood, which is harder and
actually much more suitable for this scale. The carved people looked nice
unpainted but too much like fine art. Painting them was nerve wracking but
transformed them into the cartoon characters I wanted.
Technically, I found making the machine both frustratingly
fiddly but also fascinating in that such different solutions are needed when
everything drops down a scale. So lots of satisfying problem solving was
involved. Simple mechanical elements like bearings, cranks and linkages all
had to be re-thought. I won’t know whether I got it right until the
machine has been used many thousand times. I also had to use smaller motors
than I’m used to. On this scale there’s a choice between beautiful very
expensive German ones and very cheap Chinese ones. I so love the German ones
(Maxon and Faulhauber) that I spent a long time on Ebay searching for second
hand ones – I’m still sad I never found any with the right speed range
for the train doors – they still move too fast, but I don’t think anyone
else will notice too much!
I also had to reduce the scale of the PLC, control panel,
electronics and sound system. Fortunately I’d been playing with bluetooth
speaker systems last year, working out how they get such good quality loud
sound from tiny boxes - basically speaker drivers with longer travel to
shift more air, combined with passive diaphragms. These diaphragms look like
speaker cones but are just rubber rings with metal disks in the centre. They
make better use of the changing air pressures inside the speaker enclosure
to move more air outside the enclosure (making the sound louder).
Once I added the electrics it all got quite complex inside -
it was no longer my original idea for a simple machine. I had to use a
smaller lower spec PLC controller than I’ve used recently. Though time
consuming, iIt was actually a good lesson in efficient programming. I’ve
always so admired the tiny 48k size of the memory in the Apollo moon landing
missions’ computer.
INSTALLATION
When I wrote this, the machine was about to go on the pier
to find out to see how people react. At the time I had mixed feelings about
it all (I often do at this point). The positive was realising it was a
return to my childhood fascination for the ‘working models’ that were in
all amusement arcades at the time. Subjects like ‘The Miser’s Dream’
and ‘The drunk in the Graveyard’. Like my Wonderbook flyleaves, these
aren’t as good as my childhood memories of them, but today’s technology
makes so much more possible. The negative is that I’m not sure how much my
months of work added to the initial stop motion animation. In the 1980s
advertising companies would sometimes would show me ‘animatics’ of a TV
commercial they were pitching for. At the time I remember vividly thinking
the rough and ready animatics were so much more lively than the finished
ads.
Once on the pier it had a small teething problem, but fixing
it was depressing. Overhearing the laughter and energy of people using the
other machines made the tube train seem just too mild in comparison. I did
see a few people enjoying it but still brought it home again after a couple
of weeks on the pier. Tessa (my sister and often muse) suggested returning
to a previous idea of choosing the outcome. Together we came up with the
idea of renaming it ‘EYE CONTACT’. And getting the user to simply chose
‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Technically this was all very fiddly. In the very small
space I had to swap the PLC for a newer one that had more programming steps.
Then I had to re-assign the outputs to create new ones to switch the audio
tracks and the ‘YES’ ‘NO’ push button lights. I also had to
radically change the PLC program – which became a lot more complicated.
And it now needed more than one audio track – again a problem with the
limited outputs of any PLC I could retrofit in the space. But when I finally
finished, it did feel a big improvement. Rather than the previous passive
experience it was now more like my ‘Pet or Meat’ machine where the user
is implicated in the decision making. It was also clear that it would fit
better in London at Novelty Automation, where most visitors arrive by tube.
I finally installed it in late November and it immediately
fitted in perfectly. It had finally found its home - so satisfying after all
the earlier struggles.
