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///////First Post/////////
This is my first post on Space Collective. I haven't felt in the last few months since joining that I've had anything to offer that is half as brilliant as most of the members' posts that I've seen, but I'm fascinated by all of your work and your minds, and hope that what I have to offer is pertinent.
I'm very interested in assembly, particularly in nature. I'm caught up in the very strong current in science and technology flowing inexorably toward an emulation of natural systems. Over the years I've been watching the advances in molecular engineering and biotechnology with giddy anticipation and also with mild trepidation.
My primary focus right now is on typewriters. It started when I was working on paintings that had a sort of sci-tech, neo-baroque nanotech theme back in the early nineties - this was before I really had any solid idea about what I was trying to say, and I hadn't yet heard of K. Eric Drexler or Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" talk, and I had neither a formal education nor a background in science.
I was mooching off of my then-wife's parents (university professors) and working in a little corner of her studio on campus while she completed her Master's in painting. I was 22 and stoned, essentially, without a job, a formal education, or any prospects other than making art.
I tore into a typewriter one day with the zeal of a stoner in a plumbing supply store wanting to make a bong.
That was about 14 years ago now, and I have yet to tire of making human forms from disassembled typewriters. I set up some rules for myself in those early days:
I would not solder.
I would not glue.
I would not weld.
I would not use anything other than parts of typewriters.
I would alter parts(bending) as minimally as possible.
The most engaging aspects of this process for me are the obvious things one thinks about when deconstructing something so iconic in our age (at least mine) as the typewriter is. It is loved for its beauty, and simultaneously loved and reviled for its inefficiency. It is thought of both as the liberator and enslaver of women in the 1900's. It is an ingeniously engineered little piece of machinery in which one can very clearly see the entire timeline of engineering, design and materials science in the 20th century.
When making figurative human forms from an object engineered by countless workers over countless hours of trial and error and development, I can see that, in the early days of typewriter manufacture, engineers worked from nature and the human figure. They used cast iron, natural rubber, cotton, and even sand in their construction. Typewriters were designed by gun and sewing machine manufacturers for secretaries to use, with ornate decorative painting and beveled glass panels. Parts hidden deep inside the guts of the typewriter had the appearance of bones, leaves, and the curves abounding in nature.
As the years passed, right angles and utility worked their way into the design and engineering of the typewriter. Milled aluminum, synthetic rubbers, and plastics made the typewriter lighter and cheaper to make, thusly more available to more people.
Then the computer came and now we have little need for typewriters. Is it a pity? Absolutely not. Do I feel any nostalgia for these machines? Obviously not. Brooding writers and typewriter collectors often comment about my work negatively, saying that I'm destroying history and a means of making more art in the form of the written word. To collectors I say screw you and your nostalgia and opportunism, and to writers, who wish to type so that they can deliberate more about their work on a typewriter and deliver words in a more tangible fashion I say go pick up a quill and ink if you want to deliberate, or even better, chisel it into a stone, because the typewriter was designed to be a time-saving device.
Do you think Bukowski would have used a typewriter if there was a computer around? He was going for volume. He would have loved to hole himself up with some speed and a MacBook.
I feel that typewriters are part of the past, and that it's time to move on. Keep the exceptional specimens as museum objects and repurpose the rest. We'll soon come to see all the remnants of the industrial age in this way, taking things apart at the molecular level, as well as deconstructing our knowlege accrued over the millenia and repurposing it.
I'm very interested in assembly, particularly in nature. I'm caught up in the very strong current in science and technology flowing inexorably toward an emulation of natural systems. Over the years I've been watching the advances in molecular engineering and biotechnology with giddy anticipation and also with mild trepidation.
My primary focus right now is on typewriters. It started when I was working on paintings that had a sort of sci-tech, neo-baroque nanotech theme back in the early nineties - this was before I really had any solid idea about what I was trying to say, and I hadn't yet heard of K. Eric Drexler or Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" talk, and I had neither a formal education nor a background in science.
I was mooching off of my then-wife's parents (university professors) and working in a little corner of her studio on campus while she completed her Master's in painting. I was 22 and stoned, essentially, without a job, a formal education, or any prospects other than making art.
I tore into a typewriter one day with the zeal of a stoner in a plumbing supply store wanting to make a bong.
That was about 14 years ago now, and I have yet to tire of making human forms from disassembled typewriters. I set up some rules for myself in those early days:
I would not solder.
I would not glue.
I would not weld.
I would not use anything other than parts of typewriters.
I would alter parts(bending) as minimally as possible.
The most engaging aspects of this process for me are the obvious things one thinks about when deconstructing something so iconic in our age (at least mine) as the typewriter is. It is loved for its beauty, and simultaneously loved and reviled for its inefficiency. It is thought of both as the liberator and enslaver of women in the 1900's. It is an ingeniously engineered little piece of machinery in which one can very clearly see the entire timeline of engineering, design and materials science in the 20th century.
When making figurative human forms from an object engineered by countless workers over countless hours of trial and error and development, I can see that, in the early days of typewriter manufacture, engineers worked from nature and the human figure. They used cast iron, natural rubber, cotton, and even sand in their construction. Typewriters were designed by gun and sewing machine manufacturers for secretaries to use, with ornate decorative painting and beveled glass panels. Parts hidden deep inside the guts of the typewriter had the appearance of bones, leaves, and the curves abounding in nature.
As the years passed, right angles and utility worked their way into the design and engineering of the typewriter. Milled aluminum, synthetic rubbers, and plastics made the typewriter lighter and cheaper to make, thusly more available to more people.
Then the computer came and now we have little need for typewriters. Is it a pity? Absolutely not. Do I feel any nostalgia for these machines? Obviously not. Brooding writers and typewriter collectors often comment about my work negatively, saying that I'm destroying history and a means of making more art in the form of the written word. To collectors I say screw you and your nostalgia and opportunism, and to writers, who wish to type so that they can deliberate more about their work on a typewriter and deliver words in a more tangible fashion I say go pick up a quill and ink if you want to deliberate, or even better, chisel it into a stone, because the typewriter was designed to be a time-saving device.
Do you think Bukowski would have used a typewriter if there was a computer around? He was going for volume. He would have loved to hole himself up with some speed and a MacBook.
I feel that typewriters are part of the past, and that it's time to move on. Keep the exceptional specimens as museum objects and repurpose the rest. We'll soon come to see all the remnants of the industrial age in this way, taking things apart at the molecular level, as well as deconstructing our knowlege accrued over the millenia and repurposing it.
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