Busy Busy Busy’s micro-robotic inhabitants hustle and bustle through a set of rooms in a plexiglass enclosure. The viewer looms over, observing the little men running around the same way a scientist would lab rats. All of the men are cast from a mold, making each of them virtually identical, having no individuality other than different dents in their robotic structure. They are corralled by the space they inhabit, buzzing along walls and bumping into each other. They seem to be indifferent to each other, paying no more attention to each other unless stuck in the same crowd. Each time a crowd forms, it eventually clears after a few minutes of everyone struggling to move past each other. Each one of the little robot men continues on his own path.

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This piece was initially born from a combination of my love of time lapses and slowly watching individualism becoming more and more the norm. I thought about how to translate a timelapse of a crowd, like in a subway or grocery checkout lines, and thought of the Hex Bug toys as a way to get this crowd to move around in the same frenetic way as in a time lapse.

Along with this, I painted each man in a similar color palette, with a bluish gray base tone, light off white head, and dirty legs fading into dark brown/gray/black at the robotic base. This was to give each one a feeling of being pulled down, fusing with the robotic base. In my mind this symbolized how this individualism and isolationism is something occurring by design, something as intentional as the gray walls. I wanted to take the blame off of the individuals themselves, showing that this was not their choice to be indifferent to each other.