Silly Globe, Serious Message

Artistic reminders that our globe is stressed out have been springing up around San Francisco recently. I’ll write about the Cool Globes in a separate post, but I did want to briefly acknowledge William Wiley’s wonderful Only One Earth “punball” machine, a great combination of the silly and the serious.

Wiley’s machine, based on the classic 1964 Gottlieb North Star pinball machine, is fully playable and lots of fun even for a complete pinball klutz like me. It’s also marked by Wiley’s characteristic kooky style and kitschy characters, and environmental puns (“The Eye-Scabs are melting”)–all in all a great way to keep you chuckling while getting across a serious message. Wiley created five multiples of the machine with the Electric Works Gallery, where it was originally shown along with accompanying Only One Earth watercolors. That show has closed, but the punball machine will be part of the Wiley retrospective opening at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in October 2009. (For those who’d like to see Wiley’s contraption in the company of fellow game machines, it will be at the Pacific Pinball Exposition in October.)