things that happened · no. 1
My mother is a graphic artist. For my birthday in the fifth grade she gave me a broken washing machine.
I want that sentence to sit on its own for a moment, because everything downstream of this website is in it. Not a model kit. Not a bicycle. An appliance that no longer worked, handed to a child on the understanding that he would take it apart. I have thought about this a great deal as an adult and I still cannot decide whether it was insight or simply the fastest way to get a broken washing machine out of the garage.
I had come to it prepared. Radio Shack sold a series of 100-in-1 electronics kits — a board of spring terminals, a fistful of components, and a booklet of a hundred circuits you could patch between them. I carried mine everywhere. I carried it so habitually that on a family drive my sister reached over and recovered two transistors and a pair of resistors that had been lost in my afro, which was substantial at the time and evidently had storage.
So when the washing machine arrived I already knew what I was looking at. Not an appliance. An inventory.
The part I wanted most was the timer. A washing machine timer is a motor-driven cam that closes circuits in a programmed sequence — it is, functionally, a sequencer, and it does not care in the slightest what it is switching. It was built to run an agitator. It ran horns, buzzers and lights instead.
I laid extension cords out across the yard and buried them in the bark dust, and put the horns and buzzers and lights at the far ends of them. Then I let the timer do what it was designed to do, on its own schedule, in the dark.
The effect on the Weatherstone subdivision was considerable. The important part was not the noise. The important part was that there was no visible apparatus and no visible operator — the cause was underground and the timing was nobody's decision. People do not mind being startled. They mind not being able to locate the reason.
I kept the motor for years. It sat in a box through the rest of grade school waiting for something worthy, and eventually I found it: a large bush in our front yard, close enough to the path that people had to walk past it.
I hinged one of its limbs and drove the hinge from the washing machine motor, so the bush had a jaw. I ran my voice through an Eventide Harmonizer into a PA speaker concealed in the foliage, which meant the bush did not sound like a boy behind a window — it sounded like something with the wrong number of vocal cords. And I gave it eyes that lit when it spoke, triggered by the audio itself, so they moved with the voice rather than on a switch I had to remember to throw.
Then I waited for Halloween.
I did not know at the time that I was doing anything but scaring people, and I was doing that on purpose and with enthusiasm. But the shape of it turns out to be the shape of everything since.
A shrub is a medium nobody expects to do anything. I found out how far it could be pushed, which was much further than anyone had bothered to check, and then I hid the mechanism so that all a person got was the effect and no explanation for it.
Fifteen years later I did precisely the same thing to a Macintosh bulletin board, which was a medium that was supposed to be text, and the company that made the software telephoned me to ask what I had done to it. That story is on channel 06. Fifteen years after that I hid a sound in a professional portfolio that played every eight hundred pixels of scroll, and left it running for years, and not one client ever mentioned it.
The bush is the earliest version I can point to. My mother handed me a broken appliance and I have been burying the cords ever since.
More of these as they are written. The archive is still coming down a wire.