During this unit we focused on answering the question: “how does an idea drive change?”
After learning all about the anatomy of a revolution from French historian Crane Brinton, and the aesthetics of steampunk from the book Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. We have now taken our knowledge and learnt all about metaphors, circuits and the French Revolution.
This question was answered using both humanities and scimatics to create a Rube Goldberg inspired machine that shows metaphors explaining our assigned revolution.

Preparation 

Our class split into six different groups and we were each assigned a revolution to base our project on, the American, French, Haitian, Meiji, Xinhai, Russian and Easter rising revolutions. My group, Luca O, Marshall and Jessie were assigned the French Revolution.
We started by brainstorming ideas for the machine on our own so that we could later collaborate and put our ideas together. All of our ideas were pretty different but the one idea that we all had in common were ramps, so we decided on making the base of our machine full of them descending from top to bottom.

We’ve created five different metaphors in total, each one representing an event taken place during the French Revolution. According to Crane Brinton, the first stage (the incubation stage) is shown by economic crisis, sense of government injustice, weak rulers, intellectual opposition, class division and military victory. On our machine, this is shown by our metaphor of “the Storming of Bastille”, “the Forming of the Jacobin Club” and “the Flight of Varennes.”

Incubation stage

The storming of Bastille was an event that occurred in Paris, France in 1789, where the revolutionaries stormed into the castle causing a huge riot. The Bastille, also known as the fortress, armoury and prison was seen to the revolutionaries as a sign of unfair power and decided to storm it.
We metaphorically represented this event by building a cardboard castle with Christmas lights that illuminate because of our circuit that we built, this shows the Bastille. At the end of that ramp, there is a gate made of chicken wire to show the revolutionaries storming through the castle gates.

 

The forming of the Jacobins Club was an event that also occurred in France during 1789. The Jacobins Club or its full name Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality, was a nationwide group of republicans promoting as it says in their name, freedom and equality.
We built out of cardboard a connecting ramp to guide the marble down the track and as the marble rolls across the connecting ramp. The line of cardboard people are lifted up representing the republicans, in this metaphor the marble represents the people and the republicans are helping everyone by speaking up or in this case lifting the marble down.

The Flight of Varennes occurred during the night of June, 20th 1791, King Louis XVI (an anti revolutionary) saw the French Revolution coming and decided to flee bringing his family along with him. Sadly for him the local post man recognized him and they were sent back home. We showed this event in our machine by building two bird wings on the sides of the ramp to show the king and his family trying to fly away from something they were scared of. At first we were going to build two plane wings to show the airplane they were going to take but, this is a metaphor machine and it needs metaphors.

 

The third stage (the crisis stage) is shown by radicals gaining control over government, a large use of violence and war is also often a factor. This part of our machine shows Robespierres attack and the ending of the revolution.

Crisis Stage

Robespierre was a very unkind man who promoted man suffering and slavery, but he was best known for the French Revolutions Reign of Terror. In total there were 16,594 deaths in France and Robespierre was responsible for them all. After he was arrested and killed in April 1974, the terror finally ended. My group represented these events by building a cage with a 3D pen around their track to show Robespierre going to jail and a card board lever to show him being overthrown.

The end of our machine shows the ending of the the French Revolution and all the lives lost during it. We filled a balloon with red confetti, then a spinning wheel of pins poke the balloon exploding the confetti everywhere.

 

Reflection

This was overall a very mentally exhausting project and I’m glad that it’s over. I really wish that I would have researched all the events deeper because it would’ve really helped my group in the process of creating the metaphors. As I did some extra research for this post I found information about the events that I didn’t know before. For example, I wasn’t completely sure what a Bastille was until now and also didn’t know what Robespierre had done exactly. I also would have spent more time finding better and stronger materials like wood or thin metal instead of using cardboard because our machine ended up being quite flimsy. And lastly my top piece of critique for our group and myself  is I really wish we 1) filmed outside or somewhere with better lighting and 2)took more footage, pictures and b-roll. This project overall wasn’t  one of my favourites and it didn’t turn out as great as I thought it would. However, my group and I all pushed through it and got it finished.

 

Here’s our video