Pyxis

Pyxis (Pandora’s Box) - Installation - 2013

Course & Tutor: New Media Art History and Theory

Hector Rodriguez

Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nopllq7KMY0

Pyxis is a new media art installation. It includes an Arduino Uno board with LCD , a frame and a modified reprint of Waterhouse’s Pandora painting.The topics of blackbox and feedback in cybernetics was extended into the painting. Beside the physical layer, Pyxis has an extra layer of digital structure. The mythology of Pandora’s box mentioned how bad things were released while Pandora opened the box, leaving “Hope” inside. With the help of code, the LCD screen in Pyxis keeps showing random digital numbers generated. When the numbers hit a certain symbol , the english word “HOPE” will be displayed. The work can be understand as an experiment to put the idea of gaze, symbolism of paintings into a coding device, disguising it as a painting with some similarity. The story of Pandora was told twice in Pyxis.