Me? Gongaga

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

The idea is, when we count down and change slides, kids have to mimic one thing in the painting as best they can, whether it’s animate or inanimate. If there’s nothing in the shot for them to mimic (because I threw some contemporary abstract stuff in), they have to show me how the painting makes them feel. Easy enough, gets them excited to move around and vocal about their feelings regarding art, it’s very chaotic. I can tell pretty fast who’s got the emotional maturity to mimic things in a complex way, and who’s just enough of an abstract thinker to mimic inanimate objects early on in the game...

So the first picture is this:

Napoleon Crossing the Alps. My favorite reactions are usually the kids who pretend to be the freaked-out horse, but 2 memorable occasions were the one where a student immediately scrunched up to be the rock in the foreground, and the one where a pair of girls, without any communication on their parts, decided to be Napoleon riding the horse with one as Napoleon and one as the horse. Basically one of them fully tackled the other apropos of nothing, it was hilarious

In case you’ve forgotten, this is Persistence:

And I swear every time, there’s a beat right before everyone either becomes a tree by t-posing for their life, or goes boneless like some kind of child-shaped pancake over the nearest flat surface

In case you haven’t looked at it recently, this is The Scream:

My favorite guesses from the kids to Why Is He Screaming:

-those guys behind him are going to arrest him

-he missed his boat and it’s one of the ones in the background, he just noticed

-the sky’s all wiggly

-he just wanted to scream

-HE CAN SEE THE CLASS OF FIRST GRADERS LOOKING AT HIM AND HE DOESN’T LIKE IT

I genuinely can't stop thinking about these two. Help

I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away

here's my dad and i taking it away

luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).

the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.

there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.

if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.