By the time I had come across his blog detailing the building process, he was already making the head and it was exactly like something out of a movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel, this extremely realistic, human face in translucent white plastic – something to make you question what it means to be human.  The whole project had gone from a simple hand replica to a torso, arms, and head in a matter of 8 months.  Gaël had been consulted to make a modern-looking prosthetic hand for a commercial photo shoot.  Because he recently acquired a 3D Touch FDM Printer from Bits from Bytes, he thought he’d try to see how realistic of a hand his new 3D printer could create.  The film shoot job was eventually cancelled, but Gaël was still left with the idea of printing the limb.  After successfully accomplishing the task, he decided to incorporate servos and an Arduino to yield a programmable, electronic hand.  The product was a resounding success.  He could press keys on a keyboard to cause the individual fingers to move at varying speeds.  Though the commercial job didn’t pan out, he posted his product to Thingverse and was amazed at the encouraging responses. Thingverse users loved the limb he had created, started printing and building their own versions, and wanted to see more.  So Gaël built more.

Even as a child growing up in France, Gaël was handy.  “My parents always let me use any tools I wanted, even electrical ones. It was the 70′s and they were cool and very handy themselves.” As is the case with many precocious youth, Gaël had a difficult time learning the prescribed course material in school, saying that “teachers always bored me; it is like they never had the subject I was interested in.”  His parents helped him enter art school when he was 15, where he was able to excel in sculpting.  And, today, Gaël runs his sculpting and model-making business, Factices, in Paris.

Luckily for the self-described autodidact, the Internet is proving to be a powerful tool for those who are uninterested in the education provided by mainstream sources.  With Blender (the free, open source 3D modeling software), for instance, there are a multitude of tutorials that can lead users step-by-step through the model building process.  And, with the vast supply of tutorials on any given subject throughout the Internet, Gaël explains, “You can go to the essential on what you want to learn, but you also get extra info about things you wouldn’t have searched for. I’ve been fooling with Blender for two years, now, and discover new stuff all the time.”

When it came to the programming of InMoov, Gaël found that he could learn from the expertise of others in the online community.  He has been using Myrobotlab, an open source, JavaScript-based software used to program a variety of devices in various ways.  Gaël, however, has no real robotic engineering or Arduino experience. “As a model maker and prop maker, I have had to face all kinds of demands, but I never pushed into electronics because it wasn’t my strong suit. I was always impressed with animatronics, but, at the same time, intimidated by the electronics, since I had no knowledge about them.”  In order to overcome his shortcomings in programming, he’s been getting help from GroG, the admin of the Myrobotlab forum.  According to the InMoov blog,

I had tried to use [Myrobotlabs] a few times, trying to figure stuff out on my own, but I finally decided to contact him. And boy, what a help! The GUI still remains opaque to me, but since I had been fooling around with Arduino scripts since January, I was ready to jump into Python scripts. At my very low level of knowledge, of course. GroG has been helping to figure out many problems I had with scripts, but mainly has been working on creating a special service in his software for InMoov.

This means that, if you have printed, let’s say, the hand and forearm and set servos inside and you are looking for a way to control it, with that service you can. It allows you to test your servo’s movements with sliders. If you have a microphone with your PC you can give voice commands to your servos. OpenCV should be easily installed when you install the software and that will allow you to control with its own vision your robot.

 

There are tutorials, and maybe some more coming up for easier understanding.

With the help of GroG and Myrobotslab, InMoov is able to recognize voice commands picked up by microphones located in its head (currently connected to the cameras in InMoov’s eyes, but to be moved to the appropriate locations on the sides of its head later on).  In YouTube videos, you can hear Gaël say, “Grab the ball” and the robot will open its hand and clutch something handed to it.

Gaël has also been in a good deal of communication with a user named BAS, who has been posting regularly on the InMoov blog since the project’s inception.  BAS, or Brian, has helped Gaël to troubleshoot a few problems in the building process and even presented his own version of InMoov at the MakerFaire in Pittsburgh.  InMoov seems to be proving the age old adage: it takes a village to build a free, open source, 3D-printed robot.  Gaël has told me that there are at least 20 other people around the world printing and building InMoov in their own homes:

I know one in China; he has made the InMoov controlled with a [Nintendo] Power Glove.  I also know a guy in Denmark (who built an orange hand).  One in Russia; he didn’t bother posting a picture on Thingiverse.  A few in Spain, Italy, Canada, Australia, Holland, Greece, Mexico, Poland, France, and most are in the US. But I can’t really keep track. They, from time to time, reach me for some questions and then I find out how far they’ve gone.

It is important that InMoov remain open source, for Gaël.  After MakerBot’s Thingverse changed its legal policies to state that the company owns all models uploaded to the site, the amateur roboticist stopped sharing his files there.  All of the robot’s parts are now located on Gaël’s own site attached to a non-commercial, attribution license.  I tried to ask him some leading questions as to why the robot is open source, but to no end.  As the author of this article, I can only assume that it is part of an elaborate plot to get users all over the globe to build the robot, which he has secretly programmed to become self-aware and to destroy the world’s major institutions, banks and universities, etc.  In all sincerity, though, the robot’s creator actually gave a much more peaceful answer, in regards to the robot’s purpose on this planet: “I have no idea if it will improve our lives, robots are created by us. They will be our extensions somehow.  Just like any tool, they will be what we want them to become. I trust the human race even if everyday news shows mainly our negative sides.”

After considering the open source nature of the project, I realized that it shares some similarities with the RepRap, the original open source, self-replicating, 3D printer.  Adrian Bowyer, one of the inventors of the original RepRap modeled the printer after the symbiosis found in nature.  Bowyer suggests that, as users are able to replicate the technology for human purposes, they are essentially spreading the seed of the printer in the same way that a bee, in search of nectar, carries the pollen of a flower to another part of the world, aiding the flower in its reproduction process.  It seems that the open source nature of InMoov does point towards the actualization of Bowyer’s idea.  By giving away the designs for InMoov, Gaël has allowed users to modify and enhance the robot – to grow the robot in a way that has mutually beneficial consequences for user and machine.

What is interesting is that, they transform it to do something else with it. The French guy is building some kind of a bartender that serves drinks… The Russian used it to trigger weapons.  The Chinese guy is making hands for his stepfather, who has lost them. The Polish has done other robotics projects before; he also wants to build a complete robot.  The hand has been presented by DesktopFab to the United States Congress to demonstrate the use of 3D printers in universities.

In neoliberal economic theory, it’s often put forth that the invisible hand of competition drives innovation by forcing competitors to out design one another to yield the best product, a sort of simplified Darwinian evolution.  What Bowyer’s idea suggests, and what InMoov might prove, is that, in the much more complex evolution of real ecosystems and markets, organisms and products actually develop symbiotically, as well as competitively because, without any market incentive and through the collaboration of non-competing human beings, InMoov has developed the ability to move, to listen, and to assist people.

I asked Gaël what the future of InMoov was.  “As I see it today, it is like a puzzle; I keep adding parts as long it keeps me having fun. Of course making a complete robot would be fantastic, but it’s like a kid’s fantasy.”  He also said that he is always considering some of the practical applications of the robot and sees a lot of potential use for creating fully functional prosthesis.  For Gaël, the development of InMoov seems to have truly been about the process and not the ultimate goal.  He has fun even when things go wrong, when he orders the wrong batteries online or when InMoov mistakes the command “close” (as in, “close your hand”) for “turn”.  And, for me personally, whatever the outcome of the InMoov project, I see Gaël, and ambitious Makers like him, as a model for re-discovering the intrinsic enjoyment of learning, education for the sheer pleasure of new knowledge.

Finally, I asked him something that I’m always thinking about, particularly when faced by a simulacrum representing all of my greatest fears and desires regarding the possibilities of my reasons for existing: “What is reality? What is the meaning of life?” With the response of a Taoist wanting to express no particularly rigid interpretation of the events of the cosmos, Gaël said,

Reality is our world, ground, earth, our planet. I don’t think there is a meaning of life; it is more what you do with your life that makes meaning for the rest of us. A grain of sand on a beach isn’t searching for its own “meaning of life”; although, without him, or them, there is no beach, no earth, no universe.

View List of attacks related to primary schools in a larger map

About two years ago, I was reading news reports aggregated by my Google News feed and was startled to hear about two recent stabbing incidents that took place in Chinese primary schools less than a day apart. The first happened on April 28, 2010 in Leizhou, China when a man named Chen Kangbing, a teacher from a neighboring school, attacked a class of 16 children with a knife. The next day, in Taixin, an unemployed man named Xu Yuyuan stabbed 29 kindergarteners with an 8-inch blade. This second attack was said to be inspired by a copycat mentality. And over the course of the next couple of months, more attacks took place in Chinese primary schools.

The scenes, so brutal and incomprehensible, were hard to remove from my mind. It was impossible to understand how anyone could attack a classroom filled with children. The use of knives seemed to make the stories that much more nightmarish. As is the case, though, with the majority of the world’s events, these too slowly faded from my thoughts. Otherwise, I’d never be able to go about my life after reading the news everyday.

It wasn’t until the recent massacre in Colorado that I revisited the Chinese incidents. On Mother Jones, I came across an article entitled “MAP: 50 Mass Murders Across America in 30 Years”. The map seemed to speak to a feeling I’ve had multiple times when hearing about mass violence in the media: this happens all the time. In the same moment that I still feel the horror and fear in response to a shooting like the one that took place in Colorado, I never feel surprised. Mass violence, in a variety of forms, has taken place in the world’s history for some time; the way that it manifests is the only thing that seems to change. The sensationalization by the media, then, frames mass murders as something unique and completely isolated. They never seem to examine it with a bird’s eye view.

So, when I heard about the shooting at the movie theater in Aurora, I couldn’t help but think of the kids in those schools in China. Out of curiosity, I googled “list of school attacks” and was surprised that Wikipedia had such a list and that it was even broken down into primary and secondary levels of education. I clicked on the link and saw that people have been attacking primary schools since 1764. Of course, the nature of such attacks has changed over the years, but it’s been happening since before the United States was a country and it’s happened across the globe.

To put the recent atrocity into context, I created a map based off of the Wikipedia article entitled “List of attacks related to primary schools”. From a cursory glance at the map, I haven’t been able to come to all that many conclusions, but what I did gather seems to be of importance when thinking about any acts of mass violence anywhere at anytime.

It’s Widespread
Mass violence isn’t specific to the United States. The English version of Wikipedia is clearly U.S.-biased. The majority of the entries made in the article were surely done by users from the United States and, consequently, I was going to see a larger number of attacks that took place in the U.S. – especially dating farther back in history. But, as early as 1884, there’s an entry for an act of violence in Ontario with the number of foreign attacks slowly increasing as, I assume, technology develops and the sharing of information between countries develops. By the 1990s, we see mass violence in primary schools being well-documented throughout the world.

Gun Control and Violence
While the majority of incidents in the U.S. involve the use of guns (indicated on the map with a magenta pushpin  ), the majority of incidents in China involve some sort of knife (indicated with a  ). One attack in particular clued me off to what was happening in China: on October, 12, 2005, Liu Shibing attacked 16 children in Guangde County using six home-made guns. It wasn’t until I started looking at this map that I realized why the attackers in China had used knives: China has stronger gun control laws than the United States. I found that, in China, only government officials, hunters, farmers, and a particular tribe – the Basha, who can keep guns due to their cultural importance – are allowed to own firearms. This seems to pose the possibility that gun control does not prevent people who are mentally unstable from trying to attack schools.

What gun control might do, though, is limit the amount of people that can be terminally wounded at a single time. While the Chinese attacks yielded huge numbers of injured children, the fatalities seemed to be limited. And in totaling the numbers of injured and dead from the knife-related attacks versus the gun-related attacks, there were a greater number of fatalities from guns (117 gun deaths and 87 knife deaths) and a greater number of injuries from knives (320 knife injuries and 188 gun injuries) throughout the 250 years.

Guns and knives seem to be more common methods for violence in schools, but I don’t think they cause the most damage.

War and Other Factors
Based on the coverage I’ve seen of atrocities like the one committed in Aurora, the suspects are usually characterized as mentally ill ( ). James Holmes, for instance, was taking classes on mental illness in his graduate program just before withdrawing. As cited in the Associated Press, “Mary Muscari, a criminology professor at Regis University in Denver who studies mass killings, said she was not surprised Holmes was studying neuroscience and mental disorders. ‘It could be he was interested in that because he knows there’s something different in him.’” And most of the men involved in the knife-related attacks in China were said to be suffering from mental instability as well.

I’m not sure I’d disagree with the idea that someone like Holmes is potentially suffering from mental illness, but I think that focusing on such details does draw the eye away from the role that war and large-scale conflicts () play in incidents of mass violence. The list of attacks on primary schools seems to suggests that acts of war -dating back to 1764 – have been responsible for the largest numbers of deaths in primary school massacres.

The largest single attack on a primary school was done by Chechen rebels in 2001, killing 386 people and injuring more than 700. Following that is an event in Angola in which a pilot accidentally bombed a school instead of his intended target of rebel troops located 30 miles away. The third largest was perpetrated by the Israeli air force, which bombed a small Egyptian village in 1970, including a primary school, and killed 46 children while wounding 50 others. According to Time Magazine’s 1970 report on the incident, the Israelis believed the target to be a military installation.

What this list suggests to me is that, even when the violence does come from a person said to be mentally unstable – such as the Bath School disaster (), the largest school attack ever to take place in the United States – we have a tendency to disconnect the events from the larger social context and from one another.

Men and Women
The smaller killings on the list, where just one or two people were involved, usually took place when a man was rejected by a woman () – divorces, break-ups, and thwarted advances – and attempted or successfully completed a murder suicide. The frequency of such incidents could be tied to a host of factors, but the ones that stick out in my mind are related to gender, the social structure, and ontology. The fact that, for the most part, the perpetrators were men rejected by women seems to be a symptom of violence against women taken to an extreme. Self-worth in our society is so closely linked to sex and sexual desire that, when combined with a genetic predisposition for mental illness, it’s not surprising to see a man’s reaction to rejection go so far. Rather than understanding rejection as a fact of life, it’s much more likely that a man will project his feelings onto a woman and perceive her as the source of all his frustration and ill-fortune. Most people, I think, are too overwhelmed by their lives to see their problems as part of the bigger picture and will ultimately look to their immediate surroundings for the source of their woes.

The Map
Incidents of mass murder are unique in that they are highly concentrated, happen quickly and with little anticipation. They are not unique in their severity as certain populations of our society face the long-term, chronic acts of violence associated with a lack of access to adequate food, water, shelter, disease, and safety from traumatic environments. With a society that is generally structured so that a small percentage of the population profits at the expense of a massive workforce, from the untouchables of our society all the way up to the upper-middle class, people seem to be kept in a state of discontentment almost intentionally.

Our school system isn’t geared to help each person reach his or her full potential. It’s disorganized, haphazard, and usually ushers us into various work roles where we are constantly seeking external rewards and validation to make us happy. Commercial products, such as the make-up sold by the massively profitable cosmetics industry, are pitched as the solution to our inadequacies. Our fellow neighbors – people of different backgrounds, races, sexual orientations, religious beliefs, abilities, and genders – are responsible for our unhappiness.

As the population increases exponentially and communication technology advances, it’s becoming clearer that we are living in a global community separated by neighborhoods of nations. In a neighborhood that is quite obviously suffering as a result of tyrannical rule, such as in Egypt and other countries part of the Arab Spring, the built-up discontentment has the potential to cause positive change. In a country such as the United States, where the systems of control are more subtle and ideological in nature, there is no clear plan of action for a solitary individual. The competing ideologies – the Tea Party, workers’ unions, Occupy Wall Street, the KKK, local militias, gangs – appear to the allegiance-free individual as a schizophrenic hive mind. There is no obvious form of rebellion against a system that is so complicated and loud. As a result, what appear to be senseless acts of violence occur. But they are only senseless when looked at myopically.
Whether the social structure results in small amounts of violence to the self in the form of self-control and the sublimation of impulses or dramatic acts of terror, I feel as though I can come away from looking at this map with one bit of knowledge: this happens all the time. More importantly, though, the ability to create such a map, to take a bird’s eye view of the events of the world, makes me wonder if the growing sense of community created through the internet and an awareness of the global nature of things might actually lead to a decrease in isolation and, therefore, a decrease in events the likes of Aurora, USA; Leizhou, China; and Anywhere, Ever.

Since I first wrote this, another attack on a primary school has taken place – this time, in Newtown, Connecticut.  The media and the White House roll out the same responses.  McDonald’s and Newt Gingrich tweet their condolences, thoughts and prayers to the families of those who lost their lives.  Again, the mainstream media and the political elite are myopic in regards to a mass shooting that has occurred on this planet.

President Barack Obama expresses his grief at the tragedy, without acknowledging the US Army’s policy of “opening [their] aperture” of  potential threats in Afghanistan to include children, the ongoing drone strikes that have killed at least 176 children in Pakistan, or US Government support of Israel’s own killing of innocent Palestinian children on a regular basis – at least  1,477 since 2000 – not including the deaths caused by the destruction of Palestenian infrastructure .  Also ignored is the 17,000 children who have died from a lack of medical insurance in the years between 1989 and 2009 in the United States.  He also does not acknowledge the number of people killed by severe weather that has resulted from climate change, as caused, primarily, by developed nations refusing to make major progress towards sustainable energy.

As details come out about the gunman, there will most likely be information regarding his troubled childhood and history of mental illness, limiting the causes of the incident to bad parenting and bad genes and ignoring larger structural causes: an intentionally underfunded public education system geared  to prevent the self-actualization of the majority of the population in order to maintain a large work supply.  At the same time, there is a media apparatus designed to create unattainable goals of wealth and power, which simultaneously creates fear in the population and scapegoats around every corner so that, if the population does react in some way, it is at their neighbors, potential gunmen and loose cannons, instead of those who direct the social structure themselves.  And those seemingly powerful people too are lost in the game of earning more wealth so as to remain comfortable and mistaking that comfort for happiness.  

The past few years have offered us examples of uprisings and alternative solutions to the current system within which we operate daily.  The internet provides us with endless opportunities to connect with one another and to see that our views are not isolated.  There are alternative news sources that can give us actual facts, instead of biased conjecture.  Or, if they are biased, at least they are biased in favor of preserving human dignity and reaching for equality.  We are living in a world in which creative answers to difficult problems are cropping up more and more and we are actually creating an infrastructure capable of maintaining social systems that do not rely entirely on money.  The sort of thing that happened in Connecticut will keep happening for years and years, but it is my hope that they will decrease as our collective knowledge of the collective happenings on this planet increases to the point where we acknowledge our mutually contingent existences. 

The lecture was a part of a book of poetry titled Complete All Problems. Please Show Your Work., which includes such poems as:

Real Numbers and Possible Reactions to the Introduction of Information

Loneliness

411

1-900

“69″

Boredom

411

420

1-800-DOM-INOS

Anger

411

666

187

911

The event was held at Concord, an art space in Highland Park, CA, which described the event thusly:

There is no stage, no podium. Guests will seek out their own unique encounters in text. Readers and their work will appear throughout the space, from the gallery and bedrooms to vehicles and secret corners, a living literary journal.

Which is a fancy way of saying, “It’s like a haunted house, but with people reading poems and stories instead of trying to scare you.”

It featured the works of other writers, including: Diana Arterian, Mark S Bernal, Saehee Cho, Sam Cohen, Kestrel Burley, Stacy Elaine Dacheux, Marco Franco DiDomenico, Kate Durbin, Lauren Eggert-Crowe, Emily Kiernan, Daniel Hockenson, Henry Hoke, Bryan Hurt, Amy Howden-Chapman, Lan Pham, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Kirsty Singer, Stephen Van Dyck.  And it was a lot of fun!

Look forward to more ENTER>text in the future and submit to Concord’s Lost History of Concord publication.

And don’t forget to see Mike read at Concord this Saturday’s ENTER>text from 8 to 11 pm.

Dear Hollywood Representation Directory,

               Attached you will find a tantalizing preview of the first few storyboard panels in a completed screenplay for my project, IPHONE 5 IS BORN FROM A GOSSAMER-THIN SAC SOMEWHERE IN GUANGDONG PROVINCE. My grandfather was a survivor of the Holocaust until his death last spring, and I have a lot of his stories floating around about it– in case you need some. If you are interested in taking a look at the rest of the screenplay, please do not hesitate to e-mail me immediately at my e-mail address: c.n.fusumu@gmail.com. Please include “MCAFEE SECURITY WARNING: VIRUS ENCLOSED” in the subject line, so my Mom doesn’t open it if she is snooping around my inbox. Thank you for your consideration.

iPhone 5 is born from a Gossamer-thin Sac Somewhere in Guangdong Province

A screenplay by C. N. Fusumu

PANEL 1. A Chinese Boy Youth and a Chinese Girl Youth wriggle into the sloppy uterine folds of a chamber connected to a confusing web of medical tubes and pincers holding it in place. In the background there is a Chinese Boy Adult holding a fairly impressive clipboard. The Chinese Girl Youth’s sand deposit butt is still sticking out of the flaps of the chamber’s entrance, kind of, (the Chinese boy youth went in first, little bastard!) which is somewhat sexy but also a little revolting.

PANEL 2. Big bursts (that are also giant (and downright fucking electric)) of electricity electrify the sticky gross inner folds of the chamber, through some kind of injection of powerful energy which is maybe a derivative of fireworks but inconceivably scary. The burst is going through the aforementioned medical tubes at the speed of sound, probably faster. Chinese Boy Adult Behind the Glass drops his clipboard, and his mouth is now wide-Asian open and possibly rounded… not to mention his eyes are bulging out of his glasses.

PANEL 3. The entire electric grid of Guangdong Province flickers on and off. A collection of Gambling Chinese Boy Adults are flipping out due to not being able to see their gambling chips or beer in accordance with the well-known scientific principles of light and vision, though they are (the chips and beer), ostensibly right in front of them, shrouded in the opposite of light.

PANEL 4. Out the back hole of the chamber, which is basically what a bee has for a butt (except there is no stinger but instead something more like that elevated egg sac chute on the mother alien from the second Alien movie), a completely slimed-out green stack of shit oozes out making the Chinese Boy Adult dry heave and also laugh Asianly.

PANEL 5. American Boy Business Suit-wearer stomps into the room, checking his watch, and swipes away a ton of the goop from the stack of shit with his gargantuan hands-shaking hands. He hands a pile of the goop to a hole in the ground where it is vacuumed or otherwise disappeared via a sucking SFFFFFTT sound you can almost see.

PANEL 6. American Boy Business Suit-wearer holds up a brand-fucking-new thinner, lighter, Apple A6-powered iPhone 5, which supports a 16:9 aspect ratio and has a 4-inch slick goddamn screen, a 1.2 megapixel dope-ass camera, 1 GB of memory, the controversial but stunning Lightning Connecter and boasts tons of positive critical reception on Amazon.com and other websites for being probably the sickest, most curved machine yet made by Man

Look forward to the stunning motion picture starring Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Gosling,  Meg Ryan, and Jason Gordon-Love Hewitt this holiday season.

A little bit about C.N. Fusumu:  Sorry for taking so long to get back to you, I have been unironically watching an E! Channel marathon of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”. Nobody is in the house right now, and it is the only opportunity I get to watch Kim, Kourtney and the Other One for several hours straight without being beaten up or mocked. Season 7/Episode 02 was first; I poured myself a glass of white wine (I don’t know what the name of it was; I threw the bottle at a corner of my bathroom for reasons I cannot go into right now…) and watched as Bruce Jenner scared the crap out of Kim with a spider. At first, I balked, and then, I laughed… and then I went on every social media platform available to subsribe to my newfound Godess, Kim. I mean, she screamed like a little baby and ran down the hallway of their mansion, her buttocks jiggling in a really amazing way. THAT is entertainment. I keep a copy of Infinite Jest on the table by the toilet, to make people thing I am smart, but THIS is what I really live for. Season 7/Episode 03 was next, and in that hour I really came to identify with Scott, Kim’s kind of good-looking, useless brother who is pretty much a dumbass idiot loser but nevertheless exists in this world, which is as much as any of us can say. That is as close as I am capable of calling a biography. I refer to the final sentence and not the entire paragraph, which now seems long and rambling, and I wonder why I am/was/are continuing to type it.

Follow C.N. on Twitter @bedbugs99

Why-to conduct motivational seminars:

While many people still enjoy reading words printed on paper or embedded into digital files, there are those who prefer to explore the motivations for activities via live motivational seminars.  For instance, I read excerpts from my new guidebook, why-to: a short and helpful guide to motivate one’s pursuit of activities either a.) previously not pursued or b.) pursued so regularly that no one knows or remembers why they’re doing them in the first place, at California Institute of the Arts.  These students, artists, writers, and professors hardly have time to read why-to guides in their free time, what with all of the required reading that they have in their classes.  A motivational seminar, then, is perfect for these new why-to’ers to begin asking the whys in their lives!

Why-to read at CalArts from RealityInc on Vimeo.

 

Why-to drink and take valium while conducting a motivational seminar at an art space:

And, in order to liven up a motivational seminar for an otherwise unruly crowd, it’s good to throw a little excitement into the mix.  While at Concord Space, I gave a motivational talk while drinking alcohol and taking valium to truly embody the why-to and give a physical demonstration of why-to or why-to not drink and do drugs.

Why-to host the CalArts NextWords series at the REDCAT Theater in downtown Los Angeles:

The Reality™ Institute, in conjunction with CalArts, hosted a reading series for CalArts’s graduating MFA class and I, as the host, had the opportunity to ask why-to write to a large group of audience members.  This gave The Reality™ Institute, and me, the chance to frame the whole event in terms of the larger question of “why?” and, hopefully, put each writer’s work into that larger context.

Plus, while my guidebook may be available in stores, those individuals who may not be able to run out and pick up a copy at their local SuperCrown or Borders, can at least watch my motivational seminars and get a taste for what the guidebook has to offer.

phone calls from happy why-to customers, and any news regarding the book.  Then, if anybody anywhere ends up caring about my guide, they’ll be able to Bing it on the net and find this blog.  If all goes well, maybe someone will even give me a call about it!  Pretty soon, the whole world will be asking why-to do this and why-to do that and they’ll start creating their own why-to guides! And when a society is geared towards answering and asking that question, maybe we’ll stop working towards money, power, sex, and fame and instead start working towards sustainable happiness.

So, if you’re interested in following the why-to trend, why not check out why-to-guide.com (that’s why-to-guide.com!) and start asking yourself “why?” today!

[To best simulate the Expo Experience, listen to this track reading the article.]

On December 17th, 2011, with parts and support from its parent corporation, Reality™ Incorporated Co., The Reality™ Institute held its first Reality™ Expo at Control Room in downtown Los Angeles.

For the first time ever, patrons were able to get a visceral experience of what reality™ might look like by interacting with a variety of simulated recreations of the reality situation. Replicas of various “rooms of the house” were displayed with lifelike accuracy, including appropriate paraphernalia, cultural decor, and media apparatuses all curated by a highly-ordained staff of Reality™ Specialists.

As you can see from this map (created by Evelena Ruether), the exhibit was designed to give each “room” a heightened sense of authenticity, with each cultural item devised with a high degree of specificity.

The “teen’s bedroom” for instance, included an almost flawless recreation of a genuine video game, a compact disc player with fabricated music, and pornographic comic books (as seen individually here and here).

 The “parents’ office” was a highly detailed office simulation that included two different audiobooks (here and here), synthetic poetry, a small library, and a prosaic manuscript all carefully crafted to represent the tastes of the educated, uninformed class.

The living room broadcast on a 59″ screen an extremely realistic series of commercials, instructional videos and music videos, and other forms of propaganda on a 35 minute loop throughout the night.

Finally, there was the Reality™ Frontiers portion of the expo, which included projections into the future of the possibilities of reality™.

And, because all expos need some sort of break from the knowledge imparted in them, there was sanctioned entertainment from a variety of talented guests: Patrick Benjamin, Brian Pickett, Lan Phan, Byron Campbell, Chelsea Trescott, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Seth Blake, and Hillary Kapan.  Throughout the night, our Reality™ Representatives (including Adria Bregani, Scott Grunewald, Jonathan Loney, Danielle Matich, Laurel Rosales) surveyed the patrons to ensure the authenticity of the simulation by asking quality feedback questions like “Does this feel real to you?” and “Is this really happening?”

Other Ordained Specialists included:
Melena Baralis
William Kaminski
Anthony Lowder
Oscar Moralde
Ben Nyberg
Dave Perry
Nancy Romero

Master of Ceremonies and CEO:
Michael Molitch-Hou™

All in all, the participants seemed to learn a great deal about reality™ and Reality™ Incorporated Corporation learned a great deal more…
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Hillary Kapan

Seth Blake

Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal

Chelsea Trescott

Byron Campbell

Brian Pickett

Patrick Benjamin