An Observation

The founding fathers admired and emulated Rome - a republic that lasted, more or less, some 500 years before it devolved permanently into empire. This is not to say that the Roman republic had it's periods of suppression and despotism (and by modern standards, the whole of it's history was one long sordid affair).

Nevertheless, the trend in Rome, for a time, was increased democratization and the promotion of egalitarian sympathies.

Sometime in perhaps the fifth century BCE, a remarkable speech was given by a certain Gaius Menenius Agrippa, a member of the aristocracy, though of moderate views, and the speech went like this:

"Once upon a time, the members of the human body did not agree together,as they do now, but each had its own thoughts and words to express itself. All the various parts resented the fact that they should have the worry and trouble and sheer hard work of providing everything for the belly, which remained idly among them, with nothing to do except enjoy the pleasant things they gave it. The discontented members plotted together that the hand should carry no food to the mouth, that the mouth should accept nothing that was offered it and the teeth should refuse to chew anything. Because of their anger they tried to subdue the belly by starvation only to find that they all and the entire body wasted away. From this it was that clear that the belly did indeed have a useful purpose to perform. Yes, it receives food, but, by the same token, it nourishes other members and gives back to every part of the body, through its veins, the blood it made by the process of digestion. On this blood we live and thrive".

Now, what is this fable about? Is Gaius referring to the idle rich as the belly? Or the poor?

To put it in context, the republic had suffered a series of military setbacks that resulted in economic stagnation. The lower classes and laborers - the farmers and artisans, peasants, the poor and disadvantaged, suffering under crushing debt and other restrictions imposed upon them by the aristocrats, boycotted Rome. They literally abandoned the city, offering no violence or provocations, they went on strike, and left the upper classes to their own devices.

So, within the context, it is clearly the ruling elite that is the soft belly of Rome.

Would that speech be interpreted differently today, here in America, where the cultivated attitude towards the poor would seem to suggest that they sit idly by, living off of government largesse? And if so, how would this fable be received today?

Busy Little Creature

The glass is ordered, ships out Friday. Bullseye gave me a discount on the order. Very nice.

I have three plaster/silica glass molds ready to fill and fire. I just completed the wax for a fourth today.

This one I've been calling "Mushroomtron". Don't have a proper Linnaean binomial classification for it yet. I'll work on that. Here's another view of the wax:

Kind of reminds me of fossil crinoids.

I'll get the glass mold poured tomorrow and start on the wax for number five. With any luck, I'll be casting glass end of next week!

Mechanicules and Machinerettes

This essay might skirt dangerously close to an artist's statement. Within the fictional construction/rationalization of creating all these little critters was the idea that they acted together as a community or consortium that in turn created a metabolism or quasi-stable non-equilibrial flux control system that allows fantasy machines to survive and thrive. Not having any expertise in biology or systems thinking or graph theory or networks pretty much guarantees that I will be fascinated by all that - but without having to do any of the heavy lifting. However, I do note that the trends in thinking about technology are shifting towards the worldview of living systems (see Kevin Kelly's thoughts about The Technium, or the fact that industry trend journals now regularly speak of technological ecosystems).

This makes sense as 1) technology is created by living systems, and 2) once tools get sophisticated enough, they enter the realm of behaviors inhabited by living systems. (I've talked about this before. Want to see what the Technological Singularity looks like? Study microbiology).

So, when I thought of making these little suckers, it was always in the sense of a community of things rather than individuals. And source topics would have to be the gut and its inhabitants (our Second Brain), or the neurovascular system of our brain and (all those weird - almost alien - glial cells that suffuse/support/supplement those stodgy neurons of ours). And it was always in the sense of a community of things that think (not individually, but collectively). So what are they thinking about, and what are they doing? I DON'T KNOW!



So, when I was making each of these things, either unconsciously, consciously but unwittingly, or wittingly but unintentionally, I was thinking of them as a group. And it kind of shows, what with each having either a tentacle or a grabber, or a handle of some type, or some way for them to be embedded together. And perhaps that's where I should go with them, just make a shitload and pile together in some kind of techno-biolfilm, a siliceous/mucilaginous layer of commensal sophistication.

Ooh. Eek! But still, not really all creepy, right? Or is it? maybe I'm unconsciously making plastic gyre trash.

In any case, that's probably what I should end up doing with the cast glass prepared slides. The bronzes seem to be trophies, stand alone dead representations of the mechanical creatures, but the cast glass slides, I'm thinking now, should be in vitro/vivo/situ community snapshots. Messy. Colorful. Alive. Populated.

Refractory mold waiting for the glass

Yeah, that's the ticket.

Post-Mortem

I've talked about Bose-Einstein condensates before, and actually, kind of salivated over them, thinking that some Next Big Thing will result from them. And I think I've mentioned fermionic condensates as well. But I'd have to google myself on that topic, and I just don't have the time. So, at the risk of repeating myself, I think fermionic condensates might be big shit as well. (And fermionic condensates (FCs) would be like a degenerate electron gas, supercooled and paired up to behave themselves, but they can't unify the way a BEC does due to the Pauli exclusion principle. With me? Good).

Well, it occurs to be that, as long as you have your electrons all stacked in the available energy states, as in a supercooled example, then you get your FC. Of course, what's really required is that the electrons be stacked relative to each other. In other words, they don't need to be supercooled temperature-wise, they just have to be supercooled relative to each other's energy states. And, in fact, there is now a way to do that with tunable short-pulse beam of electrons that are moving at close to the speed of light. These "cool" relativistic beams of ultrashort pulses, done with a fucking really nice tight tuning mechanism, should produce relativistic fermionic condensates. And that, dearies, should make for some really awesome applications, like superconducting charges without the materials, I'm guessing. But then, if I thought of it, I sure others much, much smarter have as well. Stellar tectonics, anyone?

Okay, okay, time to cover my Kickstarter post-mortem. It was a success, but also a failure. It was failure in the sense that kickstarter is about strangers giving you monies for your project. That didn't happen with me. Friends, family, and acquaintances made up the vast majority of contributors. So, it was my failure to adequately plan out the campaign. Not that I didn't read up and do research. We Kurmans are notorious for advance preparation when it comes to a new endeavor that interests us. Why, I've known my brother to practically put in expert hours (10,000 plus) in book-learning prior to tackling a new thing that he gets hooked on. Almost overnight. I kind of do the same thing, but I notice I have a particular blind-spot. I will do all of the research, examining and planning for all of the aspects, drilling down on every facet, covering every base - except one. And in that sub-category, I will make a beginner's mistake. Quite simply because, well, I don't know. What I do know is it must have something to do with my fascination in overall systems thinking and analysis, but not quite being fascinated with one boring detail.

So, in the kickstarter project, I think I did well on prepping the material rewards, not so well on presentation and marketing my target group.

Bill Hicks on Marketing:



You would think, as an artist, and having said many times that presentation is 90% of the whole deal, that I would have spent more time on polishing the videos. But honestly, I just wanted to get past that, and get the product vision out there. I could have done a much better job, but felt that, given pretty much everyone and his uncle is now kickstarter, that I better get something out NOW.

And I really, really didn't do a good job on identifying my demographic. What is my demographic? Well, the creepy-crawlie/Charles Adams/Edward Gorey/H.R. Giger/maybe-kinda Carlos Huante fan base out there. Instead, I had people telling me they liked my steampunk robot animals.

Steampunk? WTF? Well, steampunkish, in the sense that I used bronze, mistaken as brass, but honestly, do you see any goggles, any 19th-century design, any zeppelins and high-pressure steam engine shit in these things? I don't. And maybe that's my blind spot. But I'm going for the ultra-violet biomechanical crowd, the mutant metal creepy crawlie crowd, the Prometheus crowd.

Steam powered?

Degenerate fermionic condensate, Cooper-paired neutron fusion, matter/antimatter powered, bitches! With cigarettes and booze!

Okay, so, given that the Intertubes today are powered by photos, I really screwed the pooch by not targeting the tumblers, snapchats, and twits. I did do a half-hearted tweet campaign, but I just couldn't go fishing for those paramecia. ( Speaking of which, there were some nasty and infantile comments on reddit, and to be honest, twenty years ago I'd have engaged in a two-week-long flamewar with those losers, but, uh, fuck 'em. I notice it's becoming easier and easier to ignore over-priveleged, pretentiously pompous, pampered, undertalented, simpering little buttholes and not react to them).

And as far as social networks are concerned, my anecdotal experience is that the facebook and google+ and living social and all the rest aren't quite the Kevin Bacon dissipators we are all led to beleive. My guess is, I got to two degree of separation before the whole message drowned in noise.

My thoughts, anyway. And unlikely it is I will do another campaign, maybe not much an analysis.

Oh, yeah, pictures of machinerettes (which are little versions of mechanicules):

In Color...

...and in Black and White

And now I turn myself into a freaking factory

But don't worry about burnout. Impossible. The more I make the more refreshed I become. Here's today's output of four forms (would have been more, but I went out to lunch):

Made It!

Well, I missed it when the last backer put me over the top last night. It was only when I got home and saw some congratulatory emails on my mobile that I knew we had done it.

We. that's the operative word. So, applause. Not for me, but for my backers. I applaud you all.

Were my generosity a large furry mammal, it would be a wooly mammoth.
Were my generosity a loud noise, it would be Krakatoa. Or maybe a garbage truck dropped off the Empire State Building.
Were my generosity a landfill, it would be Puente Hills, CA - 500 feet deep with a third of LA County's trash.
Were my generosity a lump of ice, it would be the Ross Ice Shelf.
Were my generosity a comet strike, the dinosaurs would be dead  as hell.

And see? They are! And that's how big my thanks to you is!

Okay, well maybe not that big. But still pretty darn large!

So, just so you know, I haven't been sitting on my laurels. I'm working on still more funny little bronze forms, because I figure not everyone at the hundred dollar level might want the one bronze creature I've concocted. And since I've until August, I figure I can introduce a little variety.

Here's one that was in wax, now in bronze, and more in the pipeline:

...and... I've been working on some custom drawer pulls and cabinet handles (separate from the kickstarter venture, and not available at the moment) . These are a (hopeful) commission for fans of the snaky reptile handle. I'm trying to get a local cabinet maker interested in buying limited edition custom made hardware from me:

So, once again, THANKS to all my backers and I will commence to cranking out rewards and ordering the glass for many cool-as-shit things.

Charity

Note: I've been down in SW Florida the past weekend for a long weekend, a trip that has been in the planning for about six months. I got the requisite sun- and alcohol- poisoning out of the way fairly early, and was doing pretty well down there in laid back parrot-head land, until I ran afowl of the lawn chair. Keep in mind, I regularly will heft and toss fifty pound bags of ceramic powders and clay up onto shelves with the ease of a basketball free throw, no problem. But, dehydration, alcohol, and a less than mindful thought process combined to antagonize an old back injury when I lifted up a five pound lawn chair and I suddenly could not stand up straight. The remainder of the night was pain so intense I was nauseous. Fortunately, some Vicodin and muscle relaxants took care of all that, but I've been down for the count lo these past few days. As a result, I'm behind on my Kickstarter begging duties, and so you get the following:   

Being raised as an American, being fed the standard ethos of rugged individualism, stand-on-your-own-two-feetism, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps-ism, it is difficult for me to ask for help. Asking for help, asking for assistance, is, at different levels, considered shameful, even sinful, here in this country.

This is an irony that ignores reality, considering that it is impossible for any one of us individuals, at any point in history, to not be thoroughly dependent upon other individuals for our very existence. Why, even Robinson Crusoe had a prior dependence upon people before struggling on his own on a desert island.

So, I really should get over these primitive instincts. Pride being, of course, the primary primitive atavism at work here. I thought I made good progress in tamping down my pride and cultivating a healthy humility by setting up a Kickstarter project and asking for help. And of course, the beautiful thing about this is that humility in turn can be transformed into pride in my fellow human beings. The paradox is that humility, in making me small and humble, makes me, in turn, enlarged through the generosity of others. To see such a largeness of spirit and open-armed generosity is deeply affecting, and makes me feel great in turn. And the one small price I have to pay for it, really, is some small amount of alchemy, some craft and effort and shaping of things, to provide my backers with a little piece of (hopefully) magical piece of the material universe. True, it may seem like a trade bead or a trinket to others, but it contains as much benevolence and obliging congeniality as I can suffuse into it.

To those who have helped me, much obliged.

And so now I'm asking for just a little bit more help, and a chance for all you strangers out there to embiggen yourselves a bit more.

This is the final week of the (ah-ha-ha, now I know how public TV feels) pledge drive for my project. I'm very close, currently 72% funded, for the project. All I need is a few more contributors, and then, it shall be my turn to be generous. And, believe me, I will not disappoint.