Toy Story
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ToyMaker is set up to manufacture souvenir tops with gyroscopes inside. “The main idea was for you to walk away with a personalized Gravitron–with your name on it, the color you want [orange, green, or purple], and today’s date,” McDonald says. The tops are assembled behind glass at 14 stations connected by conveyor belts. Visitors pay $3, log in with a name and color choice, and are assigned a numbered pallet they can follow as the parts are fetched, joined, and welded and the finished product is laser engraved, quality tested, and packaged. The process is supposed take less than five minutes from start to finish, and the line should produce 300 tops an hour. But so far it seems the only thing in motion most of the time is one or another of the “Christmas tree” lights atop the stations, flashing red to signal a shutdown.
The periphery of the line is ringed with sideshows where visitors can play with computers and robot arms even if production is down. One robot takes your photograph and does a dance while holding it, another draws a cartoon, a third plays a shell game. These metal arms are endearingly anthropomorphic–some even have names, like Max and Lisa–but the exercise is a lot like a visit to an ATM and about as complex as a multiple-choice exam on your favorite color. Max and Lisa can put together a simple model of the museum out of blocks, but you wouldn’t want them to take out your appendix. McDonald says a major goal for the exhibit is to inspire kids to become maintenance technicians: “In our world today we don’t have enough people to service robotic facilities. We need people to fix the machines.” On that level, ToyMaker may already be working. The need’s been made obvious, and there are lots of role models around–darting from station to station while muttering into cell phones, taking direction from programmers at the mother ship before starting up the line one more time. Meanwhile, museum employees forage in a big cardboard box for premade Gravitrons to give visitors whose pallets are stranded somewhere between the flywheel subassembly and sonic welder. “We’re working out the bugs,” McDonald says. He expects to be operating on a full schedule by the end of the month.
Now he’s taken the work he shot (and some of his previous stuff) and made his own 40-minute video, I Was a Zero in CITY 2000. It includes scenes from the events he was sent to cover: the Minneapolis-to-Chicago AIDS ride (featuring footage of a serial hugger enjoying the same peak moment with a succession of people) and Taste of Chicago on the Fourth of July (teenage boys yelling “faggot” at a transvestite; lingering shots of trash on the street). “My work isn’t cynical, but it doesn’t want to back away from what’s out there,” Palazzolo says. “I think they weren’t looking for the downside. Nobody wanted my eccentrics.” Says Stamets: “Every second of video I commissioned him to shoot and paid him to shoot is in the CITY 2000 archive,” which is housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Palazzolo will premiere I Was a Zero at 7:30 PM Wednesday, July 16, as part of the Reeltime series at Evanston’s Block Museum; at Palazzolo’s request Stamets will also be there with Moving Pictures, his anthology of video from the project.
