The purpose of this post is to provide a general overview of my current state. It’s the end of summer 2021, a strange summer over which the haze of COVID hangs but doesn’t block out the sun.
I was organizing things on this site today, and adding my reading list (see sidebar on home page). I realized that there was a significant gap between spurts of progress. Through explaining that gap, I hope to contextualize my work and my own journey over the past year or two.
Our blog starts in the fall of 2020, with posts showing up in October, November, and December. At this stage, I had moved to an apartment in Brooklyn with a lot of extra space, and intended to set up a workshop to pursue some creative projects that I had been thinking about. The project that emerged at the forefront of this effort was an attempt to re-build an Electric Unicycle from a more basic set of components. I didn’t want to rebuild everything, but I did want to fabricate a frame and battery pack, essentially a chassis. I bought an electric motor and wheel combo (hub motor form), that had come out of an old EUC.
The EUC project slowed to a crawl over the 2020-2021 winter, as the apartment workspace showed it’s limits, and I re-engaged with my “work” at the time (employment as an engineer).
The blog picks back up in July of 2021, which corresponds almost perfectly to my termination (on June 25) of the employment contract which I had been working under since December 2020.
My decision to quit my job was a very good one, made in spite of the pressure I felt to cling to a “stable” economic situation.
Since then, I have been working for almost two full months on miscellaneous objects of my attention. Sometimes less work than a sort of muddled traipsing through life attempting to glimpse a spot of blue in the clouds.
Most recently, I have been fortunate to find some kindred spirits in the shared studio workshop space that I am a member of. It turns out a lot of artists a) fabricate projects for clients in exchange for money, and b) are interested in having things fabricated as part of some cash generation process. This means that there is a niche of opportunities to use my interest in fabrication and my existing technical skills.
Of course, like most circumstances, I have found that the most important skill I have is the ability to work like a dog. The best compliment I have received came from a strung out ex-convict on a roof somewhere in New Hampshire, when he told me that I was a good worker. I admire the endurance of those men who work with a sort of jerky, untiring attitude, as if they are fistfighting with life.
The ability to make money to cover my rent and food in the same space as my personal projects has afforded me the energy and motivation to make some progress, and that’s what I have been trying to document.
I am currently enthralled by a number of interwoven concepts and projects related to those concepts, like usual. It is very hard for me to schematize, because there are multi-scale relations betwen the objects of my desire-to-work.
My two main current projects are:
- Building an E-Bike out of an old frame
- Building a low-cost version of an Atomic Force Microscope