*Mr Hunkin's got a tinkerer's utopia going on there. It's a life one might well envy. I also like the limpid simplicity of this essay, which might almost rank as a manifesto.
http://www.timhunkin.com/a194_rubegoldberg-essay.htm
This essay about my machines and how I work was commissioned to accompany an exhibition called ‘Rube Goldberg’s Ghost’ in Chicago (feb 2013).
Rube Goldberg is not well known in the UK, he was a US cartoonist who drew contraptions with chain reactions, similar to Heath Robinson in the UK.
by Tim Hunkin
I’ve made things since I was a small child. Aged about seven, I found my most satisfying machines were ones that made people laugh. 55 years on, nothing much has changed. Like Rube Goldberg, I studied engineering and then became a cartoonist. I must have enjoyed engineering more than Goldberg, because I always wanted to actually make my machines, rather than just draw them.
Today, my main business is running a small amusement arcade on a seaside pier in the UK (The Under The Pier Show, Southwold Pier). It’s unusual because all the machines are home-made, mostly by me. I feel very lucky to have it. Anytime I can go down to the pier and see people enjoying using my machines and having a good time. This keeps me working, encouraging me to make the next machine.
Then at the end of each week I empty the coins. They are so heavy I can’t lift them all – it feels like real money. And it really is a wonderful way to live – no schmoozing with people in power, no layers of bureaucracy to navigate, no cheques from stupid projects that should never have been funded anyway, and no exaggerating the truth to get grants.
Goldberg’s machines are always described as useless and my machines are too. But they both made us enough money to live off, which is quite useful. Also making people laugh is useful, a lot more beneficial than many ‘serious’ advances in technology like yet another new computer operating system. My aunt Lis, who is very religious, describes my arcade as my ministry.
People often ask me where my ideas come from. I’m entertained by the absurdities of modern world and particularly enjoy media hysteria because it’s so silly and yet everyone takes it so seriously. For example, ‘Whack a Banker’ came from the financial crash. Sometimes the ideas are more personal – ‘Microbreak’ came from arguing with my wife about a proposed holiday.
But I think initial ‘concepts’ or ideas are always over-rated. My starting points are usually quite simple – the fun and skill is in the making. Once I’ve started any machine I get completely absorbed in the research, and today Google images and Youtube make research such fun. So over the months in workshop any initial basic idea, however bad, gets constantly embellished and usually turns out OK.
What I love is the physical process of making a machine. It’s partly drawing - not pretty drawings but drawing as a way of thinking through problems. This gets better and better as I get older, with more experience to feed in. The making process also involves lots of prototypes – there are many problems drawings can never solve. This is where is vital to have good stores, not only to have the parts to try something, but also to jog the memory for possible alternative solutions. Stores are a physical version of a memory map.
When the stores fail the internet takes over. Delivery in a small country like the UK is speedy so almost anything I need arrives the next day. For expensive parts there are always cheaper alternatives on Ebay. Since the advent of the internet I often feel like a child in a sweet shop, I literally have the world at my fingertips.
I also feel as if I have limitless territory. Today’s world is full of machines with amazing software and simple physical interfaces, but very few machines are the other way round. Physical, electromechanical machines with a bit of software wizardry like the ones I make remain largely unexplored territory.
Personally, I don’t think of my arcade as ‘contemporary art’, more as popular entertainment. I don’t see myself as an artist, more as a mix of showman, cartoonist and inventor. Rube Goldberg is also usually referred to as a cartoonist or inventor rather than as an artist....
