Andrea Fautheree Márquez

Plato’s Venus is a laser-cut, cardboard automata (a moving, mechanical device) that was designed in Illustrator and laser-cut, built entirely with recycled and found materials. A nude, anatomically-exaggerated Venus poses, wrapped in her hair and encased by a giant scallop shell while a blue LED blinks at her feet. Turning the dowel moves two cams, which push Venus and her shell up and down, and blinks the LED on and off.

The work was inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” a famous Renaissance painting depicting Venus, the goddess of love, sexuality, beauty, and fertility, arriving at the shore in a giant scallop shell, following her birth, in which she sprung, fully-grown, from sea foam.

I was intrigued by the concept of recreating something old, a Renaissance painting, which depicts something ancient, a Roman mythology, using emergent technologies such as laser-cutting and LEDS.

The title comes from Alexander McQueen’s collection “Plato’s Atlantis,” a groundbreaking fashion show in which McQueen utilized projectors and digitally-printed fabrics to depict a dystopian world in which humans have evolved to live underwater.

While still beautiful and graceful, my Venus carries a robotic, digital quality, enhanced by the LED and the tracings of the laser-cutter. Thus, ancient becomes entangled with futuristic, and the human form is rendered with an obvious lack of human touch.

To allow for the scallop shell to bend and move, I designed a living hinge — a laser-cut pattern that allows for pliable movement in the material — with a row of tiny diamonds in the space between the two halves of the shell. I also customized rounded cams to create more noticeable vertical movement when the wooden dowel is turned. As the user turns the wooden dowel, the cam pushes Venus and the upper part of the shell upwards and downwards, almost as though she is both emerging from the shell and being encased all at once.

To add some flair, and with the help of my friend Farjana Ria Khan, I added a small, blue LED light directly beneath Venus’ feet. A coin battery and some copper tape touch whenever the shell is lowered, thus completing the circuit and triggering the LED.