Ever since I was a kid I’ve been in love with technology whether that be a smartphone, a smart watch, or even a game console. we’ve come a long way of computers the size of entire rooms to today where they’re the size of a small book. With my love of tech comes my love of gaming, I grew up playing Xbox with my brothers, it provided hours of entertainment and brought me closer to different people around the world, especially in todays time where all anyone can do with all this excess time is play some videogames. the Xbox one in recent years has been becoming more geometric in shape with the latest series X being what most people compare to as a fridge. but before the Series X, came the Xbox One X (I know, these names are pretty repetitive) this one in my opinion is what the definition of a gaming console is: A small, powerful, and yet simple gaming box. As pleasing as it looks on the outside, wait till you look on the inside. Under all of the plastic and metal, you’ll find a green circuit board with so many different circuits engraved on it, so many tiny wires going everywhere, so many components attached on the board etc. Its amazing that this board is doing all of the work that ends up producing the hours of entertainment for millions of players. That was pretty much the inspiration for my final piece, Circuit city.
Circuit City is an attempt to capture the beauty of internal tech, beauty that is never seen unless you do the hard work and take apart your tech. In my first project I made a mini version of my laptop, opened it up and revealed that under it all were human organs working together to make the laptop work and come alive. similar concept only this time I take one of my favorite consoles, the Xbox One X, and show you what’s going on inside. This whole piece is a combination of 3D prints and a laser engraved image. The materials consisted of: Black and gold 3D print filament, dark green plexiglass for the laser engraved image, conductive tape, Led Lights, some coin cell batteries, and a adafruit crickit board.
The story of the internals mirrors that of the real world. the know it all CPU is pretty much in control of everything, right in the center of Circuit city. She’s surrounded by luxurious high rise golden building and has access to every part of the city with ease. call the center the rich corporations that pretty much control the world. on the left you’ll find the cooling fan (that actually does spin) which represents power plants, feeding energy and keeping cool the motherboard while she is hard at work. Alongside the power plant, you’ll notice the signature Xbox green hue, showing that the console itself is on and also hard at work. moving to the upper right hand corner you’ll find 3 tall silver identical buildings representing brokerage firms found on wall street monitoring and trading on the stock market, again feeding straight into the motherboard.
Moving along, here’s a better view of what I’d like to call, the low income area, components that aren’t up there with all the corporations, yet are still crucial to the overall system. Essentially this is the low & middle class of the society. while the corporations have their golden luxurious buildings, these guys have a golden park showing that they value nature and it isn’t always about wealth to them. they have radio towers that help them communicate with the higher ups.
This is the circuit board/city layout, It was printed on the green plexiglass with LEDs underneath that turn on and off to represent breathing of the city. Back to the layout, if you look closely, the low income district only really has 2 roads that will lead it to the CPU but besides that, any component will have to go through the wall street district before getting a chance to say a word to the precious CPU.
The buildings are what make this piece stand out, there are several different types that represent their districts. As stated before, the main district has all the golden skyscrapers along with the CPU that has sphere on the top representing an eyeball that oversees the city.
You’ll also start to notice the little magnets attached to the components, well another feature of this project is that each piece is module and the viewer is free to move buildings around and change up the story, maybe the low end district rose up and infiltrated the CPU district and drove the high rise buildings out of their neighborhood and into the low end to suffer just like the low/middle class did. The viewer is able to change up the story however they want to.
There is a lot of play with this piece, remember the front of the Xbox, how it had a disk slot in the front, well for a sense of nostalgia, you can push the little cartridge in to turn on the bright green LEDs to make the system run. Want easy access to the circuit board? one section of the Xbox is entirely held on using magnets so you can remove that section and get a closer look of the motherboard. want the city to come even more alive, open the brown box in the back to reveal a adafruit cricket, flip the switch on it and watch more LEDS turn on and fade in the background. While you are having fun watching the images produced on the TV, the console itself is producing an image on its own. What looks to be a normal Xbox is really a new way to play so “Jump In” and explore Circuit city.