By Jessica Wind (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 17, 2012
If you’ve taken a walk through the second floor of D building in the last year, you may have noticed a bit of nostalgia hanging on the wall.
Members of the Computer Information System Student Association (CISSA) are responsible for the pushpin mural depicting a pixellated Mario in action. Comprised of 17,438 push pins, the mural was started in 2008; since then CISSA has worked on a Mega Man mural and are now well on their way to completing one for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
CISSA president Ryan McCann admits there may be a theme emerging.
“I could do something obscure, but everyone would walk by and think ‘what’s that?’” McCann says, explaining how the mural ideas were plucked from classic and recognizable videogames to keep the project open to everyone passing by.
McCann has been involved with the projects since the first mustachioed plumber was constructed. “I brainstormed that one, I didn’t actually finish building it,” he explains.
The first mural, now encased in a plexiglass frame near the CISSA centre, is a screenshot reminiscent of Super Mario Bros. 3 for NES: a powered-up Mario has jumped over a piranha plant, avoided two goombas, and is about to punch a question block.
According to an article posted on the UFV website in 2009, it took over two semesters to complete.
Many of the original students that worked on the mural have now graduated, but McCann has kept the project going. Most of the reason the original Mario mural took so long to complete, he says, was caused by difficulties in acquiring enough of a uniformly-sized pin. With that problem solved, progress on the third piece began in September and is moving along much more quickly.
McCann explains that construction of a pushpin mural is, at its core, relatively simple.
“Make image, find out how many pins are in the image, buy pins, paint pins, put pins in the board,” he says with a laugh. But there is a little more to it than that; the image needs to be broken down in order to determine the amount of pins necessary, and this is where computer science enters the project.
“I wrote a little program to do it,” notes Mccann.
After getting a pin count, the CISSA group applies a grid to their canvas on the wall and mark dots for each pushpin. Following a printout of the image, McCann and other CISSA students stab each pin into the board after spray-painting them the correct colour.
However, despite following the printout, mistakes still happen.
“Hopefully you catch it before you do too much work,” McCann explains, wielding a pair of needle-nose pliers. The pins are so tightly compacted that it isn’t as easy as taking a pin off the wall to correct a mistake.
McCann, who graduates this year, hopes to be finished his last classic videogame-themed pushpin mural by the end of October. Once completed, the Zelda mural—featuring Link on his travels—will contain 16,900 pushpins.
There was a second project, depicting Capcom’s Megaman, between the original Mario project and the one now in progress, but the mural took longer than necessary to complete due to lack of contribution from students.
“We don’t talk about it. It was sitting up there for a year with maybe 500 pins left,” McCann explains.
It is finished now, and leaning against the window of the Student Computing Centre, but getting the murals displayed has proven to be a long and arduous process for the CIS department—Mario wasn’t displayed until three years after its completion.
However, this doesn’t mean that people weren’t responsive to the artwork. “Mario was a quarter million hits online,” MacCann reminisces, bringing up the Flickr account where the original photos can be viewed. The students hope to gain a similar response for Zelda.
All three murals can be seen at the Student Computer Centre at D224 on the Abbotsford Campus, and all students are welcome to stop by and stab a pin in, or take a look at the work in progress.
