Speaker To Others

One of my current endeavors is to “teach” others how to make the kind of things I do. I don’t think “teach” is really the right word – “facilitator” might fit better, although my process can be described as “here’s a bunch of stuff I’ve made and there is a pile of the kind of stuff I made them from – go to it”.

Of course it is not that simple – we have a discussion on the concept of listening to your materials. Dig through the “materials” and see what jumps out to you. Two defunct computer mice look like feet, and now you need to find legs – or maybe not. Maybe one mouse looks like a flyer which you could imagine is bringing someone home from space. Maybe it needs some wings on the bottom, or rocket engines at the rear.

Fit Checks as an art form

You don’t really know until you put something together, even if its just with hot glue and a prayer. I have found that this approach applies to pretty much everything. Until all the pieces are together, you can’t really see what you have made. Complicated machines such as rockets are often made of components built by various vendors. Everything is built to exact specifications. Eventually all of the components are shipped to the launch site and put together in a “fit check” – does everything really go together as designed? When you turn it on, does everything light up like it is supposed to?

One can create – as I do – a visual image in my brain of what should come next – now that I’ve got a nice pair of feet, what kind of legs are needed? Then what about the hips? Then the body, arms, head and more. Sometimes the path is from the head downward, or with the eyes backward.

This is usually fruitful, but not always. Some works sat around for years until the next right piece crossed my path.

Spreading the Inspiration

Here are a few pictures from the various events/workshops I have led. Currently they take place at Austin Creative Reuse. I typically do a workshop named “Reuse Robots” (and no, that was not my choice of name) every other month or so.

I bring my collection of small junk (metals, broken electronics, dead photo flashes, defunct light strings, remote controls for things long gone over the tech rainbow bridge, and a lot other stuff one might not consider “craft” material), set out the hot glue guns (not my preferred adhesive method, but sufficient for the task), give my blurb about creating, show off some of my work which I have brought along, then turn ’em loose.

Every time the attendees combine the ‘soft’ craft materials available in the ACR classroom with the aforementioned collection of junk from me, and create quite interesting things.

It is particularly fun to watch children making things – sometimes without an apparent understanding of the limits of hot glue, the materials and the laws of physics (especially gravity). Being a person who is acquainted with the imagination of children (and hasn’t totally lost his own, despite the passage of 60 some years), this behavior is not only not surprising, but quite heartening – to see the children try to make “adult impossible” things, and wondering if it will make it home in one piece. (I cannot complain nor pass judgement on such things, seeing as at least one of my example works endures an unexpected failure of connectivity due to too much tumbling around for the sake of the poor drops of super glue with which I bound the piece together).

While there is an official survey which attendants are encouraged to take, I have only one question: “Did you have fun?” And guess what? The answers are always “yes” — mission accomplished.

I must also offer thanks to some of the “people in charge” at ACR, especially Molly Shaw, who, upon seeing my work, sort of talked me into holding a class about building such things. She was right, I do enjoy the hell out of these classes and so apparently do the attendees (see above concerning the ‘survey’ results).

Below is a sample of the works created by attendees to the various creative events I have “led”.