Fisher Price Cot Activity Centre Space Jockey Platform

a) Stage one of a digital painting that explores how influence from various versions of the Fisher Price Cot Activity Centre might have an underlying effect on or reflect the modern creative consciousness in its attitude to compact amalgamation, including the juggernaut pilot platform from Prometheus, and also toys of that nature might merge with sci-fi thinking.  

b) Obviously the cow that jumped over the moon should have six white blobs on its hide to make it look like the Prometheus star map.

A very late version of the Fisher-Price Cot Activity Centre
serving as an inspiration for this piece.

c) See also: Giger's Passage Temple Entrance: Biomechanisation of the Fisher Price Cot Activity Centre at alienexplorations.blogspot.co.uk

Effects from seeing Prometheus

leading from

film scenario explorations 

a) When Prometheus came out in 2012, I wasn't particularly that interested in most of the designs and what they should mean to the Alien mythology. From then on there wasn't really much of one for me other than some general ideas that reflected the engineers relationship with the space jockey thing in the chair in Alien.

b) However I personally started experiencing ideas about the reality of a holographic universe and it wasn't really something that interested too many people. I also picked apart the designs to see how the creatures seemed to reflect a certain Pink Floyd influence, in terms of Gerald Scarfe's work on The Wall movie and then also where the designs didn't work, they opted for something influenced by Ralph Steadman from his Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas days.

c) Then another secret behind the movie coming to the surface was an interest in Steely Dan's Deacon Blues song. I was however inspired to think about the ancient tablets showing off ideas about Ancient Astronaut concepts, but the production didn't lead anywhere that vital, and there was little to talk about afterwards. However the scene involving the holographic orrery and the discovery of the sleeping giant was something that deserved repeated necessary viewing for me.

d) The mysteries regarding the original space jockey had been left behind and replaced by something that didn't quite fit and it saddened many. Taking the engineer itself for what it was, unrelated to the original space jockey and its mysteries was likely to start leading some people off in new directions. When I started thinking about how it resembled Master Burg from various stories by Moebius, there were some other places to go.

(see Exploring Moebius' influence on Prometheus for item about Master Burg.)

The Slaughterhouse Derelict idea

leading from

film scenario explorations

a) Later in the 2000s, my scenario evolved to being one about the derelict ship being a sort of a bastardized hospital ship that was also a slaughter house. The ship landed with the idea of saving the dying inhabitants of the planetoid from a weapons factory disaster. I had always been inspired by the idea that Giger had imagined that there had been a technological civilisation upon the planetoid that was somehow destroyed. There isn't any known connection with the novel Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

b) The vessel landed to have the victim's remains processed and they become food for the thing we know as spores. However the are not allowed to leave the planetoid because they have become contaminated. The planetoid is considered to be "on lockdown" (which is a term that I have picked up from the Prometheus commentary). Their DNA will be harvested from the remaining life forms in aeons to come.

c) Another concept that I had was that they couldn't return to their home world because the necessary Stargate or wormhole leading to their place of origin was shut. Perhaps this concept reminds me of the Harkonnen Castle concept for Jodorowsky's Dune. So the spores represent a remnant of a civilisation to be revived. If they become the aliens, then a much more intelligent civilised species of alien life form might come out of it later.

Giger's Dune II Castle Harkonnen that shreds
its visitors and then digests them in its bowels

Derelict as a temple environment in space

a) Transformation temple
In the 1990s my idea about the derelict mystery transformed by studying the way that in the Alien script had the derelict and the silo as two different places belonging to two different species and then they became part of the same vessel and the alien life forms soon were the cargo of the derelict ship rather than an invading life form. I was very interested though in how victims of the aliens were somehow being transformed into spores, originally going with the assumption that it was an actual metamorphosis taking place because of the photograph of Giger's original Brett Egg looking as if Brett was slowly metamorphosing into something. Later I discovered that Ridley's idea was that the human victims were literally being eaten alive by an alien life form.

b) The Demon's tomb
From reading a magazine article, I liked the idea that the derelict interior seemed like the inside of a demon's tomb and from Ridley's I liked the idea of derelict ship interior also somehow being a temple environment with the space jockey on his seat as a central icon and then I thought perhaps this meant that the silo was a crypt for a hibernating ancient civilisation in a form far removed from anything understandable. These temples might well be forming out of the subconscious perhaps. I liked the idea that something might be derelict and then somehow, and what the observer thought they were looking at might only just be icing on the cake as far as what it actually was. Later I would find out that the Space Jockey with its chair was largely inspired by the Sokar Funerary Barque used in ancient Egyption rituals.

c) Dissecting the derelict
Back in the later 1990s, I compiled a document of information called Dissecting the Derelict (which sounds a bit too much like the name of the book Dissecting Alien that came out a little earlier) to look at the possibilities that there were other ways to think about the mysteries of Alien, The Derelict Ship and the Space Jockey, rather than leave it as nothing more than what Jim Cameron said about the derelict ship in Aliens.  (See: My original essay from about 1998 Dissecting the derelict)

Another one of these Predalien thingies that I keep drawing.

Predalien sketch

Exploration of an alien with a face behind a face behind a face