Depending on my current self-esteem I consider myself either a "found object artist" or a "hoarder." Either way what this means is that I bring stuff home like a rat does shiny bits of foil. There's no telling what might catch my eye. While my "collecting" is indeed impulsive, the real reason I prefer thrifting, salvaging and scrapping to ordinary shopping is that I am absolved of all the guilt that comes with consuming new goods, such as the raw material usage, the inevitable packaging trash, the carbon footprint of shipping, and the potential for human labor exploitation in every step of the process. 

By choosing to use old stuff over new, I can create art with a minimal amount of what's known as "embedded suffering," the sum total of past and future human pain incurred in the creation of the work. That suffering, or at least the karmic burden of it, becomes a real part of what an artist untimately shares with their audience, regardless of how much awareness of that suffering the audience has. My intention as an artist is (usually) to create and share joy, not pain. As such, most of the stuff in this project is reused, recycled, repurposed or otherwise revived; in other words - sanitized for your protection from embedded suffering, to the degree possible. Of course, nothing in a capitalist system is truly free from embedded suffering, but by choosing primarily reused objects I hope to encapsulate that suffering in the past where it was created, and thereby insulate the audience from it in the present, if only for a moment. 

The intended result is that we can enjoy the experience together in a small bubble of innocence, where happiness is allowed to rise to the surface unanchored by worries about waste and pain. 

Next Section: Physical Parts