Made On Earth

Fire-Cooled Brew

Fire-Cooled Brew

Photography by Simon Jansen New Zealander Simon Jansen has all the bona fides of an alpha maker. A software engineer and classic car restorer, he’s got a half-built R2-D2 and a custom minibike he made from scratch. He achieved geek fame with his ASCII animation of Star Wars scenes (asciimation.co.nz), which practically defined obsessive attention […]

The Nature of Microcontrollers

The Nature of Microcontrollers

A Washington native, Claude Zervas brings his background as a software engineer to a fine art practice using technology and related apparatuses rather than paint and canvas as a medium. Zervas’ predominant subject matter for the past few years has been the Northwest’s verdant and extreme landscape: dense evergreen forests, glacier-melt rivers, and strange roadside […]

Hard Wood – Vehicles made from wood

Hard Wood – Vehicles made from wood

Photograph by Rob Carter of Mixed Greens Gallery In Lee Stoetzel’s world, Harley-Davidsons, Volkswagen buses, Macintosh computers, and McDonald’s Big Macs all grow on trees. Or at least the materials to make them do. The Pennsylvania artist recreates iconic products entirely out of wood, with a little steel and Bondo for support. “I stick with […]

Eco-Gym

Eco-Gym

The modern gymnasium is very much a 19th- century creation, no matter how much the fitness freak is kitted out with bad hair, retro headbands, and spandex, or contemporary embedded LCD interfaces and computer-generated body plans. Gyms harken back to a world of classical mechanical physics, plugged into equations of work and energy. To the […]

Instruments of Invention

Instruments of Invention

Photography by Sam Alvar Bob Dylan was born in his hometown, but Duluth TankPodDrum’s shell is a hollow, 6″-diameter, performance artist Tim Kaiser has a different musical 14″-tall stainless steel vessel that Kaiser scored for hero: Harry Partch (1901-1974), an underappreciated 70 cents at a salvage yard. In his home studio, he composer who invented […]