The Amazing Tale of Blinky

The spellbinding life of a light fixture

For the first half of my senior year in college, I took a class over at Clark University in Graphic Design. It was a project-oriented class, stressing the application of design principles through a variety of presentations. In order to expose us to working with various mediums, we completed what was called (cue thunder and lightning) - the Object Study. This was a series of projects that spanned the entire semester. Every week or so we would use a different medium to represent our object, which was randomly assigned at the beginning of class. Other students were assigned such things as a pair of scissors, a tube of paint, a leaf, a paperclip, etc. I was assigned the lightbulb.

So, throughout the course of the semester, I spent a lot of time with my lightbulb, who came to be rather famous back home. "What are doing with your lightbulb today?" people would ask. I came to call the course "My Lightbulb Class." Early on in the saga, before it was well known, I got some very strange looks for saying "Well, I have to go home and Xerox my lightbulb." Eventually it was decided that he needed a name, and so I named him Blinky. Over the course of the semester, I drew, inked, charcoal rubbed, Xeroxed, rendered from simple geometric shapes, and otherwise did strange things to represent Blinky. All of this was finally brought to a close with the final Object Poster, in which Blinky appeared with shafts of light bursting from his sides, held aloft by a slithering tentacle, below a quote from H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space. Blinky is retired now, and lives on my desk in his little cardboard apartment.