This assignment focused on exploring the materiality of cardboard through the construction of a personalized avatar. The prompt was very open ended and it allowed me to focus on a very specific creation related to my personal psyche. 

I decieded to create a mobile avatar which had different parts that corresponded to different parts of myself. It is meant to be a figurative representaiton of my nervous system and internal organs. This assignment required that the avatar represent the person it was made for in a more introspective way. I decieded to take this in a more literal direction and literally look inside of myself. 

I created a spine and a rib cage which intertwined the spinal structure of a human with the ribcage of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The rib cages are attached to the spinal chord much like many balsa wood models I had of the Tyrannosaurus rex as a child. Inside are my organs but they have bene constructed mechanically. This is to show that I think of myself as a machine required to produce work in an almost mechanical manner. Yet, the presense of these mechanical organs within myself, and them taking the form of the more life-like organ shows that this may be distorted by my own self-perception. 

My brain is represented by an Air Traffic Control tower with various small mechanical attachments and a small tin lunchbox at the center. The lunchbox is a small addition that resembles lunchboxes I used to take to school as a younger kid. It also is meant to carry various ideas that I "unpack" and then translate to the real world through the mechanics of my brain. The air traffic control tower also represents my interest in aviaition and my need for control over the things I control, I tend to be detail oriented just to make sure a project conveys and looks exactly how I want it to.

The larger sails are a method of transportation for this vessel that would presumably exist on a larger scale somewhere in the world. The reason that the avatar is mobile is because i wanted it to be able to explore environments on its own, to traverse different worlds and subject areas and respond to them. In theory this avatar is self sufficient and represents a moment in my work where I became a bit introspective about how my work methods can be categorized as mechanical. However, I think that they are really influenced by my own specific interests and passions. This dynamic between passion and mechanic work production is what I wanted to explore with this model.