– Gear-head motors, PIR sensor, transistors, relay, slip-ring, wood, paper, graphite, aluminum, bicycle tires, wheel, steel cable.

This was built fast, fast, fast…reaction to the crawling slowness that I was otherwise engaged in.

2014: stuck, and totally broke after rent.  I should have been building small, low-current switching regulators, and improving circuit protection on Walker, Porcupine and Rocker – weeks of work, I couldn’t settle down to do. 

I wanted to jump into something different,  get my hands dirty, and get my brain out of the regimented, plodding I’d restricted myself to.  But I had no time, no cash to finish the project I was supposed to be working on.

Suddenly disgusted with myself, how had it come to this? I wouldn’t let myself make something without a definite goal, without funding, without a deadline?

I decided to take the rest of the day off from circuit design to just make something with whatever I had, and whatever I could scavenge from the street: bits of metal, hardware, wires, old motors, furniture casters, paper and graphite sticks, bicycle tires, a piece of flexible wood.

12 hours later I had a bare skeleton of wood paper and scrap metal…and my “one day” project turned into weeks of mechanical fiddling. When I mounted the first set of legs, I didn’t like how they looked. Even though it worked, I ripped them off and started again. It was fun to play, to figure things out.  But it was also the beginning of a different way of working:  Grad school was over and so was access to a metal lathe, a milling-machine, drill-press, grinders, or other specialized tools. And without money for new materials, I couldn’t build the kind of robotic, moving pieces I’d been working towards. So… no more robots… just cannibalized structures.

I managed to show it 3 times…The last time there was a brief magic moment during the vernissage at Daïmôn in Gatineau where it was shown with the humo, leche, y miel series: someone (who didn’t know I was the artist) came to grab me, telling me the ‘performance’ was starting in the black box.

Curious, I followed everyone down to where my work was installed. I had mounted the spinning paper brain hanging on a chain from the ceiling, it was spinning. Nothing exciting. Then I realized somehow rocker had gotten entangled with it and the spinning paper brain was dragging the rocker robot along with it. For all the world it looked like a choreographed robotic dance. I don’t think I could’ve done it on purpose. I wish someone had shot a video!

In any case, it was one of those moments that made me realize that creatures (flesh or techne) under control of humans holds no interest for me. I want to set up the possibilities for dysfunction.