Pinball, Art, and Re-imagining: A Conversation with Stephen Hendee

Friday Arts

Your practice often explores emerging technologies that society hasn’t processed before jumping into—like internet or virtual reality. Pinball seems a bit different. Its origins date back to the 1890s, and most mainstream manufacturers shut down by the 1990s.

What first drew you to the idea of working with pinball?

Stephen Hendee

Pinball machines are really amazing objects and odd contributors to the digital present. In terms of their mechanics, they hold memory in physical switches, which is really similar to early 20th century phone banks technology. It was that moment before memory became integrated into circuit boards.

There are lot of different technical and aesthetic decisions colliding in that single object. The pinball machines are physical gaming. It's very analog. But, so much of the game is really based in how you manage the fact that you can't touch anything. It is very physical, but only so much interaction is possible. Otherwise, you will tilt the machine.

It also has a specific engineering or design to it, where there's only so many different possible things that you can do. And one of those things is that you get really good at the shots, you know, through practice. Something about the design of those machines is captivating to me. All the people that are involved in the various aspects of design from the engineering of the play of the physical mechanisms, to the history of the pop culture component.

And, they are a form of a multiple. Pinball machines are based in a history of printmaking and edition making. Screen printers are also deeply involved in the development of many of the components. Screen printing technology is something that's very much a 20th century mass production, but it's pop art. So that aspect of it being played onto an object that is a game is interesting.

You play pinball, right? What’s the scene like?

I play pinball in a league in Baltimore City called The Holy Frijoles. It's a sport that is reliant on practice and just being present and knowing the games. There's some really amazing players locally. There will be people from all over the East Coast that will come to play because they really like the scene here.

Juana Summers, who you might hear on NPR, is an avid pinball player and is a part of this community. She runs this area’s Bells and Chimes, which is a pinball league for women and non-binary folk. Those are really interesting environments, specifically trying to upend the standard archetype of pinball being this masculine sport that only men play.

Pinball machines were big in popular culture, less so in the mind of artists. The Who released their rock opera about Tommy the “Pinball Wizard” in 1969. Wayne Thiebauld produced a handful of pinball works in the fifties and sixties, followed by Blinky Palermo's Flipper works in the seventies.

In some sense the machines still around are a reflection of the society of decades ago, right?

I find working through that history and re-theming pinball machines a really interesting connection with that history. A lot of pinball machines really started being fabricated during the '30s. They were considered gambling machines, so you only found them in the back of bars or in pretty seedy places. And then finally, during the '70s, those rules got overturned, and it became more mainstream.

The machines that I primarily am looking at to restore are pretty much from the late '60s to the mid '70s. Some of them have subjects or content that are kind of objectionable. There are pinball collectors who would say, they're all precious and perfect. And I would say, there's thousands of these. I think some of them could be re-imagined in something that is a little bit more—sophisticated or somehow not as problematic. Why can't we have pinball machines that are more reflective of concerns or themes of this moment?

What does it mean to re-imagine a game field or the faceplate?

The act of re-theming a pinball machine is to strip away all of the information including changing the back glass. And that back glass and the design of the machine sometimes is very, very specific. When you change it, then you kind of have to repaint and reprint all of the information. It can be done by hand, or it can also be done using classic technology like screen printing.

In the past, I've done this all by hand. It's very finicky. The amount of electrical components and wiring that many of these pinball machines have is pretty extensive. The act of taking the pinball machine from what it was and turning it into another object, which is unique and special—I find it really engaging.

I also really appreciate when a pinball person comes across something they've never seen before because it is such a popular and fan-based subject for many people who know the machines. When they see one that they've never seen before, you can see how their relationship with the machine really changes. And they're like, "Well, I've never seen this before. "Can it be played?" And so part of this project is to make things that can be played that are useful to someone.

Can you describe the process of re-theming?

I strip the machine down to its basic shapes and plan. Then I establish another design on top of an older machine. One of the things that's really compelling about pinball technology is that it's similar to old phones with relays. The analog machines are very much related to some of the earliest memory—a score on a machine is a form of memory that's held in the machine as a switch setting or a relay setting. So they precede computers in that way.

As the ball goes through the system and triggers targets, that memory is shifted and changed in the form of a score. That pre-digital space that is depicted within those objects and that history. The history of pinball machines is also the history of popular technology changing. Now, you have pinball machines that have full on HD animations and sophisticated programming sets.

Tell us about your machine Golem XIV.

Stanisław Lem was deeply inspiring to me—his focus on humanity and relationship to technology. I created a pinball machine based on one of his books about an artificial intelligence program that gains sentience.

My pinball machine, called Golem XIV, is based on that character and the virtual space that the computer program exists in. There's a physical matrix that's described by Lem of what the computer's circuitry looked like inside of the building that that mechanism lived in and I was interested in developing the language that he was describing in the surfaces of the pinball machine.

Golem XIV was purchased by PinBaltimore and is now used in competition in the league settings. it's dependable enough and challenging enough that people look forward to playing that game.

What inspired your Fiasco A and Fiasco B machines?

The material I use is meant to evoke the written descriptions of the alien landscape in the dark satire Fiasco, written by Stanisław Lem. Pinball machines are often pop-culture based. I wanted to make something obscure so, I figured an Eastern European science fiction writer who wrote in the 1980s about artificial intelligence hallucinating and the inability for humans to communicate without there being huge complications seemed like an interesting narrative to illuminate. It's about the fallacy of human communication.

I don't often work in hyper-descriptive or hyper-illustrative ways. The texture is made from grey production clay, a creative solution to scaling the surface effects of the synthetic aggregate material that I’ve made in the past. This rough material covers the exterior of the Fiasco B cabinet and it's used on a number of previous sculpture works, like Methane. I informally refer to the material as "Death Goo”—it is extremely durable.