This page is very heavy on graphics, please be patient with it's loading, if you appreciate art, you will find something here...
I tend to get a lot of letters asking how I came up with the idea for Alexi, and also telling me that she has inspired other people to make their own art cars. That is great, I really encourage people to do art cars if they have the desire to. As for my influences...
Alexi was named after the underground railroad train, the Alexi-5000 used to enter and subsequently escape the underground virus lab, the Hive, in Resident Evil.
Although the name is recent, many factors played into the manufacture of Alexi. I always wanted an armored vehicle, a post apocalypse car.
Ever since I was about 6 I always liked electronics. Anything that looked futuristic or complicated. To this day one of my favorite songs is still Going Under by Devo. Right about my sophomore year in high school, Information Society released their album Hack. On the cover was the lead singers car, a 1973 Plymouth Satellite Sebring that had been altered with expanded metal and circuitry. That solidified the desire for such a car right then and there.
Zdzislaw Beksinki was influential as well... http://www.beksinski.pl/
I also watched the movie Equilibrium a great deal when creating Alexi. Several elements of this movie crept into her design, but not entirely in a direct way.
Mostly the emotion of the movie, which director Kurt Wimmer describes as a movie about being numb, which is how I felt when creating her. The process exorcised a lot of emotion that I could not really express any other way at the time. If there is only one thing you decide to inspect further as a result of this page, make it this movie. It may be hard to find, but it is easy to purchase on Ebay or most of your better large video stores sell it (not usually Blockbuster or Hollywood though, I got mine at Suncoast)
Another influence that came about from this movie was that I began looking at the designs of Hugh Ferris, whose architectural art inspired the design of the monolithic structures that the city featured in Equilibrium was composed of. Some of his work is pictured here...
Recently I have taken strong inspiration from Joachim Luetke who has the ability to create things that are nearly indescribable. Examples below...Please take a moment of time to visit his website at the link provided.
Another influence were the Borg from Star Trek. I wanted the car to look like it started out as a hearse but was slowly being eaten alive by a virus of circuitry.
I put off the project several times before finally finding the right hearse, a 1976 S&S Endloader. The original design was to only do it if I could find a 1970-1973 Superior Endloader, I was pretty set on that. I kept finding them, but the problem was that they were either all too nice, or so trashed that I would not feel bad cutting and welding and such, but the car would have fallen completely apart due to rust in a few years.
Finally I found the hearse that would become Alexi. Not quite the 1973 Superior I had hoped for, but it turned out a lot better. The S&S was rusted along some rooflines and missing the original vinyl roof, but had a solid frame. The paint was pretty bad, as was the interior, but structurally she was sound.
I wanted this hearse to look as though it could drive straight through you and never look back. I wanted something that looked as though it had been through hell and meant something worse than death. An influence for this came from the Creeper Van in Jeepers Creepers.
Initially I planned to make the A:L:E:X:I: site completely arcane and encoded with secret meanings. I was not going to spell anything out, just sort of leave synonyms everywhere and let people draw their own conclusions but it occurred to me that a lot of the meaning behind A:L:E:X:I: and why I made her would be lost.
Another reason for constructing this car was for a survival tool in Burning Man. I will probably not go to be a part of a camp because there looks to be a metric assload of half naked hippies there (who have ALL apparently decided to bring their dogs with them. I have said it before and I'll say it again, why the hell is it that hippies, who cannot handle bathing and hygiene for one life form, decide to get a dog? I mean, do they figure that their personal ass stench cannot be complete without a dog added to the deal for good measure?)
At any rate by the time of Burning Man I will have both a propane powered flamethrower as well as a heated shower on the exterior of the car.
By the way, if you have no idea what I am talking about, Burning man is a GIANT festival in the middle of a dried up lake bed in the Nevada desert. How giant? Look at this picture below:::
Yeah, that is a big fucking festival.
Also, if you have not seen what goes on at Burning Man, check out http://www.burningman.com
Finally, I wanted to recognize some other creations I have found on the web. If you have a post apocalyptic car, or an art car and would like to share it with me, please do. I am always interested in other peoples art and work.
This was a reinforced bulldozer that a local man in Colorado built to destroy a number of structures in his home town. Basically it was a mission of retribution, but he did not kill anyone, in fact, watching police videos it was very obvious he was not out to end any lives. At any rate, the eventual failure was not at the hands of police (they tried damned near everything to stop it, but when your vehicle is covered in a protective shell made of double one inch thick metal plates filled with 6 inches of concrete, a police revolver only does so much) but the radiator was somehow compromised. Since there were no windows, vision was provided by small cameras and monitors, the camera lenses were cleared of debris and dust using preinstalled high pressure air jets that blew them clean after knocking down a building.
Artwork of Alexi that appeared in the Cyberpunk cardgame. If ANYONE has a set of these cards with Alexi in them, please let me know, I have not been able to obtain them yet.
No story to accompany photo...
Same deal.
The "X-S", an Alexi inspired creation owned by Alex Lohman
Mad Mac car replica...
Scavenger, owned and created by Agent Arc Angel who was also an integral part of the wing creation on Alexi along with James!
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God Module pics, for the hell of it...
