A dozen students in Hot Springs Junior Academy art teacher Natalie Miller's first-period class have spent the past four weeks building a 13-foot tall robotic sculpture that will serve as the entryway into Spa-Con IV later this week.
It is the first time that the Junior Academy art classes have collaborated with Spa-Con to produce a project, and is also a first for Miller, as far as its substantial size.
"We do some recycled art, but we've never built anything to this scale," she said.
The robotic sculpture will consist of a large headpiece with two leg pieces on either side. The 8-by-8 foot open mouth of the robot will serve as the entryway into Spa-Con at the Hot Springs Convention Center. Once completed, it will primarily be made of recycled cardboard.
Miller said that Bill Solleder, Visit Hot Springs' director of marketing, contacted her with the idea for the project over the summer, and though there had been talk of a full-scale robot statue, ended up specifically requesting a "giant robot head."
"We just went with the head, and I think it will be cool," she said.
When completed, the piece will be copper-colored and self-standing. Inspiration for the style of the design came from collaborative research among the students.
"It's kind of a combination of this headpiece, then a couple of the boys and one of the girls found these leg pieces that they liked. So it'll actually be a head with some leg pieces coming off of it. So it's just kind of a combination of all their ideas," Miller said.
Creating the project's elements will likely be completed "by the end of class on Monday," she said.
The head's individual pieces are being built at the school, but must be assembled by the class on-site at the convention center using hot glue and tape.
Since the structure is made of mostly recycled materials, the cost to the school was minimal for materials.
"The only cost that we had was tape and spray paint. Everything else was donated. I just asked for cardboard and it came by the boatloads from the teachers. We had a huge pile of cardboard in here," Miller said, noting student involvement in community events is important.
"Most of them didn't even know about Spa-Con, that it existed. So this is kind of putting them out there, letting them help their community and see about some of the events that they didn't even know about, because a lot of them don't go downtown, and they don't see all of this. I try to introduce them to different things like this."
Following the robot's set up, Miller said she plans to take her students to view several of the art galleries downtown. "We're going to go see some of the stuff that we have, that they don't even know we have all this art," she said.
For their efforts, each of Miller's students, along with two EAST students who have contributed their technical skills to the project, will receive free admission into Spa-Con.
Seventh-grade EAST students Kington Fields and Anthony Guardado said Miller approached them with the idea to make the robotic head produce noises, and they eagerly obliged.
Over the past four weeks, they have worked to create a set of four different robotic sounds that will play on a loop from a device within the head and be projected through two speakers.
Fields said the experience taught him valuable programming skills.
"We've also learned how to change the tempo and make melodies, and also use sounds to support the melodies," Guardado said.
"We had a really fun time making this."
The students' handiwork will be available for viewing at the entrance to Spa-Con at the Hot Springs Convention Center from Sept. 20-22. For Spa-Con information or tickets, visit https://spa-con.org.
Local on 09/14/2019