Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Anthropomorphism: or why robots are awesome.

I've discovered a new art form that is 100% where-have-you-been-all-my-life awesome.  It's building robot sculptures out of scrap metal.  It's ok - I'll wait a second for the sheer weight of its awesome to sink in.

Seriously awesome, right?

The thing is, I've basically spent my whole life waiting to discover this robot making talent.   I'm an anthropomorphizer extraordinaire.  Also, forget you, blogger.com, for not recognizing anthropomorphizer as a word.  It's totally a word.  And if it wasn't before, it is now.  But as I was saying - I've been giving  inanimate objects personalities for years.  I used to take all of my silverware at dinner and secretly give them names and act out tragedies of Shakespearean order determined by who had to touch what food.  It always ended with the knife dying a bloody and horrific death.  I've also been known to carry around bags of googly eyes and stick them everywhere.  All the fruit in the fruit bowl?  Googly eyed.  Cans of beans at the grocery store?  Googly eyed.  Shriveled potato that I convinced my friend to crochet a small hat for?  Googly eyed.  Similarly, when my husband and I were dating, if I was bored and in his apartment I'd go to his workbench where he kept all of his soldering equipment and rearrange the tools into robot-like shapes.  Then I'd place them all in a circle and pretend they were having a conference on ending world-wide nuclear proliferation.  True story. 

 Aren't you secretly a little glad I found a photo of the potato?

So for some reason it took me all this time to realize that my true calling in life is to turn scrap metal and discarded household items into robot sculptures.  And now that I've found this calling, I've already made 9 robots in 11 days, and you can see them all on my facebook album aptly named "Robots!".  Essentially I gather all sorts of metal bits from thrift shops and the second hand building supply store, lay them all out in front of me, and start playing.  Then I get out the tools and start poking, prodding, drilling, cutting, and bolting until I have a finished robot friend.  Plus, when the store clerks see the bizarre haul of unrelated metal pieces I bring to the counter, they inevitably ask me what I'm doing with all of it, and I get to answer "make robots" which I think we can all agree is the best answer ever.   

This is what I start with:



And these are some of my creations:







This, friends, is just the beginning of my robot making adventure.  I'm teaching myself how to wire multiple bulb lamps so you can expect some robot lighting fixtures soon.  And did I mention that some of these will end up as planters?  It's true, and will be just as awesome as you think.