I-Wei, of Crabfu Steamworks, took a Losi Micro Crawler and added Space Voyager moonbuggy parts and an astronaut to create a moon rover that can really tackle some rough terrain. Another cool Crabfu project.
It was interesting to get this video from him last night. I had just gotten home from an art show of a friend, Megan Blafas. In this show, Megan took stuffed animals, vivisected them, and recombined them to create her own surrealist plushies, bizarre and whimsical mythical creatures. It seems so obvious, when you think about it. So why don’t more people do this sort of real-world parts swapping?
The inventor Perry Kaye’s whole notion of “Frankenstein Prototyping” is based around the idea of getting people to think of the built world around them as just collections of parts that can be unbuilt and recombined to create interesting and useful new things — we live in a universe of parts. Perry thinks of Toys R Us and the local home and hardware stores as parts stores, full of functioning sub-assemblies just waiting to be recombined into new functioning devices, what he’s dubbed Frankenstein Prototypes.
I think it takes a little change in one’s mindset to see the world in this way, to look at an R/C monster truck and think of combining it with a moon buggy model, or to look at your stuffed animal collection and see a collection of body parts. Okay, that last one might be for artists and psychopaths only, but I think you get the idea. Think of that new motherload of technocrap that’s coming home from CES, not just as the tech it is now, but the tech it might become if you recombine it in interesting ways.
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