Meet the Makers – Heather Eiden * Craft Me Calm

Tell us about yourself.
I am an artist in residence, tile maker, early childhood art educator and a yoga instructor.

What are you presenting at Maker Faire Milwaukee?
I will be presenting my Story Tile display. It was my thesis project for my art education masters.

What inspires you to make?
Making things gets me excited about life. The goal is to see art in everything. I have a spiritual connection to my grandfather who was an inventor.

Why do you consider yourself a Maker?
I am a maker in the way I manipulate phenomena in the exploration of materials.

What tips or advice would you give to someone who wants to become a Maker?
Be inspired by the marketing skills of our fellow Americans. We are brilliant at marketing and design. Americans can market everything from breathing to bricks.

For more info check out the 2016 profile page for Heather Eiden * Craft Me Calm.

Meet the Makers – James from Basement Graphics

Tell us about yourself.
I am a collage artist from Wauwatosa and I have been creating for about 15 years. Even though I took art classes in college, I never got the knack of illustration. To scratch that creative itch, I turned to collage, a form that (mostly) uses existing text and images. Recently I’ve begun leveraging my body of work into images for greeting cards. These can be found on Etsy and in several area retailers.

What are you presenting at Maker Faire Milwaukee?
I’m showing my line of cards and I’ll be explaining my creative method.
I’ll also have several large, decorative and some smaller original pieces on display so people can see and touch the results of my work.

I’ll have visitors participate in making several collaborative (or crowd-sourced) works of paper on wood. I’ll supply a stack of magazines and glue/water solution and people will be able to apply images and text to complement what other have done before. I’m hoping for a strange results.

What inspires you to make?
You might say that I hack the worthless words and images that commercial media throws at us everyday. I want to scoop up fragments of that trash and make something beautiful, macabre, sensual or ironic out of it and I want the viewer to share in the wonder elicited by this re-contextualization of everyday media garbage. I work only with found material like scrap plywood and old magazines.

Why do you consider yourself a Maker?
I am executing my vision and offering it to the world to inspire, to mock or to tease meaning out of the inherently meaningless. I do what I do for it’s own sake. I am the boss of my time and my energy. I don’t have remarkable skills or technical know-how but I think that simple tearing, cutting and gluing elevates humble or toxic junk to ingredients of communication. I also want other people to see what is possible and to maybe use my methods for different purposes.

What tips or advice would you give to someone who wants to become a Maker?
Until recently I though that the term “Maker” was reserved for people doing high tech stuff like 3d printing or building robots. At some point, maybe it was the TED talk or maybe it was an article in Wired, I got a more liberal view of the term “Maker”. So you make physical things and if you’re down on yourself like I was, don’t try to overcome through some act of will. Just use your skills again and and again and you’ll begin to want to share your work. You probably know way more than you think you do.

If you could make one thing that would improve the world, what would it be?
I worked out a system that would use carrion animals like flies, and beetles to strip the flesh from the recently deceased, leaving only the bones. The next of kin, if that person had the desire, could keep the skull or the femurs as mementos of the loved one. If possessing the bones of dead relatives seems disgusting, the skull could be engraved and stored in a crypt–just like in the old country.

Why do this? Cut down on the demand for cemetery plots. Bring us closer to the reality of death. Use natural processes to dispose of corpses. Generate complete skeletons for study. Make a non-destructive way to practice some forms of forensic medicine.

Seriously, I worked out the rate of decomposition in ideal conditions when aided by XYZ species of insect and rodent–and to leave a 100% compete, undamaged skeleton. Not many people are interested in talking about this.

For more info check out the 2016 profile page for Basement Graphics.

Meet the Makers – Adrian Volden

Tell us about yourself.
I was born 50 years too late. Missed the whole tinkerer generation. When I was young I tore apart anything that wasn’t nailed down. I come from a mechanically-inclined family. I joined the Makerspace several years ago to have access to machines I didn’t have. I still haven’t finished the project, I joined the Makerspace to complete, but I’m sure having a great time learning a lot and meeting like-minded people.

What are you presenting at Maker Faire Milwaukee?
I am presenting a art project that includes neon painted items, crafted projects and flow-dynamics. I started prepping for this right after the 2015 Maker Faire. It looks great in my head, hoping it looks that good in the Dark Arts Room.

What inspires you to make?
Making is a very loose term. Much of my time is making parts and repairing items for family, friends, fellow-makers and organizations. This year’s Dark Arts Project inspired me because I think it looks cool.

What is something you’ve made that you are most proud of, and why?
There isn’t just one thing I’m most proud of. I really enjoy the process of making and helping others do the same.

Why do you consider yourself a Maker?
I can take a project from thought through its completion. My wife says I can fix anything. It might not look good but it’s gonna work.

What tips or advice would you give to someone who wants to become a Maker?
Just do it.

Tell us about one of your failed projects.
There has been quite a bit of trial and error while working on my Dark Arts Project this year. There have been multiple trips to the dump and recycling center.

If you could make one thing that would improve the world, what would it be?
Go back to creating products that are not planned to be obsolete shortly thereafter.

For more info check out the 2016 profile page for Adrian Volden.

Meet the Makers – MiLO (the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra)

Tell us about yourself?
MiLO (the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra) is an improvisation collective for live electronic music performance. Since 2007, the group has been a mixture of UWM faculty, students, alumni, and Milwaukee locals. Each member brings their own instruments to play, from home-brew software to home-built analog synthesizers.

What are you presenting at Maker Faire Milwaukee?
We’ll be performing a number of pieces that showcase our electronics. We’re all about creating tapestries of sound: exciting, ambient, noisy, and smooth. As part of the show, we’d like to grab some of the audience members to join in so they can experience playing these new instruments.

What inspires you to make?
All of the members of MiLO have their own connection to music, but based on their enthusiasm every time we rehearse, it has to be a passion for performing together.

Why do you consider yourself a Maker?
Every musician is a maker. The notes on the page aren’t music until a player makes them into music through performance.

What tips or advice would you give to someone who wants to become a Maker?
Why not design and build your own musical instrument? Every instrument was once just a crazy idea.

Tell us about one of your failed projects.
For a few years now, we wanted to play a 7 hour marathon concert set to a video of the Bergensbanen train ride through Norway. It’s a failure because we haven’t yet found the right venue and date for a 7 hour concert.

For more info check out the 2016 profile page for MiLO (the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra).

Meet the Makers – Circuit Breaker Labs

Tell us about yourself.
I’m Amanda Preske and I’ve been a maker since I was old enough to use scissors and markers. I started a jewelry business in grade school because I had made way too much jewelry for anyone in my family to wear. I went to two universities in Rochester, NY, used my business to support myself through college, and now hold a PhD in chemistry. I worked on synthesizing semiconductor nanocrystals, which are really awesome materials that emit different colors of light based on their size (usually that kind of thing is material dependent, not size dependent!). Faced with working in a research lab for the next 30 years, I opted to venture out on my own handmaking STEAM-inspired products.

What are you presenting at Maker Faire Milwaukee?
I’ve produced a line of wearables for men and women that incorporate recycled circuit boards. I’ve been making circuit board jewelry in my signature style for nearly a decade. Each piece is carefully cut and cleaned before being covered in a layer of epoxy resin. The resin has a high surface tension, which allows me to create a “bubble” over the resin, which acts as a lens. I make all kinds of things including traditional jewelry, items for men (cufflinks, tie bars, tie tacks), belt buckles, badge reels, and so on.

What inspires you to make?
I have this indescribable internal drive to make things. I feel restless when I’m not making something or doing something. Even when I was working in chemistry, I found a project that allowed me to make crystals all day. I’ve turned jewelry making into a career, but when I’m not making jewelry, I’ve got my hands buried in something else.

What is something you’ve made that you are most proud of, and why?
I’ve recently gotten pretty proficient at soldering (and the other associated skills with metalsmithing like cutting, filing, cleaning, and polishing), which has opened up a whole new world of possibility for jewelry design. I work primarily in copper and silver, and layer rounded elements to create visually interesting necklaces and earrings (see green necklace with three connected circles).

What tips or advice would you give to someone who wants to become a Maker?
Jump in! When I started getting into jewelry making, it was before the days of the internet so I relied on magazines and books to learn basic techniques. If it’s something with more of a learning curve, I’ll sign up for a class. So far I’ve taken classes on photography, metalsmithing, and glass flameworking, and I’d like to learn how to throw clay on a wheel and work with circuits some day.

For more info check out the 2016 profile page for Circuit Breaker Labs.

Meet the Makers – John from Modular Addict

Tell us about yourself.
I’m a pretty ordinary guy. Thirtysomething. Work/family/home kind of thing. Great record collection, greater tool collection, and a mostly lifelong passion for synthesizers that were priced out of my reach for most of my life. Somewhere along the way in my late teens or early twenties I decided to start playing around with making them, and somewhere further down the line I decided to start taking it seriously. I was a little frustrated with the prices and accessibility of some of the amazing synth DIY projects out there, so I decided to spin up Modular Addict to help make some of these products/projects more accessible to people in the US – turns out, people dug the idea – business has really exploded.

What are you presenting at Maker Faire Milwaukee?
We’ll be bringing out a pretty large modular synthesizer or two – entirely DIY/hand-built. Many people are familiar with keyboard-type synthesizers – at a high level, they’re a collection of oscillators, amplifiers, filters, and envelopes which are all pre-designed and prepackaged to work in certain ways. With the modular approach, you start with an empty case, then add any number of modules – oscillators, amplifiers, filters, sequencers, etc. – you build it the way you want, to be used the way you want to use it. Besides that, all the connections are made via patch cables – you’ve got total control over the sounds, patterns and timbres you pull out of the synthesizer – and total flexibility to creatively abuse it.

It sounds sort of complex on the face of it, but it’s really intuitive once you spend even a few minutes playing with one.

The breadth and quality of the DIY synth kits and PCBs out there is crazy, and they’re so accessible now – both in terms of cost and simplicity. If you know, basically, how to solder, you can build a synthesizer. We’re really excited to let people get hands on and play with them!

What inspires you to make?
If I’m being honest, probably some unhealthy compulsive tendencies. I don’t like being idle; I’m always on the search for that one new sound that I wasn’t able to generate before, and I’ve got this enormous parts collection that I eventually need to get through….But there’s something deeper there: If I’m not focused on Synth-DIY, I’m woodturning, laser cutting, etc. – working on something.

What tips or advice would you give to someone who wants to become a Maker?
Avoid analysis paralysis like the plague. It’s the leading cause of my projects not getting off the ground. Just jump in and do it. Fail if you will. Learn something. Iterate. Improve.

Related to the above, find your own way – it’s too easy to go to the internet and read a million conflicting opinions on the most perfect way to do something. Just try something. You’ll learn as you go.

When you’re troubleshooting or trying to fix something: At all costs, don’t let it win. Your next problem/project will smell the defeat on you and beat you.

Tell us about one of your failed projects.
There aren’t a ton. At the risk of sounding like a tool, I generally stay at them until I get them. I don’t have a lot that get canned. That said, I’ve got a Prusa i3 build that I’m probably never going to finish calibrating at this point…

If you could make one thing that would improve the world, what would it be?
Some method to get people to quit using the passing lane for things other than, you know, passing.

For more info check out the 2016 profile page for Modular Addict.

Meet the Makers – Jess Holz

Tell us about yourself.
I’m an artist and a scientist – I’ve lived in both worlds, pursued each separately as well as finding some common ground in microscopy. Somehow these days I tend to end up with access to some fancy microscope, and feel compelled to explore the world with it, which can be tricky because a sort of personal exploration is not always in the realm of publishable scientific research. So I have to be careful to not hog the instrument for exploratory work. But I can create some meaning in these excursions by sharing them as art. I’m a photographer at heart, since I was small, and microscopes opened up a whole new world to explore.

What are you presenting at Maker Faire Milwaukee?
I am presenting “window into the cell”, a motorized representation of a biological cell, complete with jiggling proteins. It is meant to be a compliment to static textbook representations of cells, and give a sense of molecular crowding of the cytoplasm (I love molecular crowding and complexity!. Mostly it’s for fun – you press a button and the cell lights up, comes alive. It is based on an actual cross section of a cell I imaged with a scanning electron microscope (see image below). This image is a product of an accident – I mistakenly mounted the glass surface containing cells upside down onto the adhesive specimen holder. I immediately flipped it over and remounted it. Most of the cells were destroyed but this one just sort of got its top knicked off, revealing its dense cytoplasm crammed with proteins.

What inspires you to make?
Art is just something I just need to do. I can’t imagine not doing it. In my art practice I’m most interested in scientific visual culture – how scientific imagery affects how we think and how we dream. Some people are story collectors, I am an image collector – I see something interesting and just need to capture it, on camera or under the microscope. In terms of subject matter I have a lot of pictures of insects – I just love imaging bugs – exoskeletons are so ornate, and I’m just fascinated by their sensory systems.

Why do you consider yourself a Maker?
I’m relatively new to ‘making’, unless you consider photography making – I tended to shy away from power tools until more recently. But once you see the possibilities of making, there’s no turning back. It’s great to have this iota of control over consumerism, in the form of manufacturing some of your own stuff.

I’m currently working on building a simple webcam microscope out of laser cut parts (the plans for which are readily available online, btw). I’ve focused too much on high end instruments which I would probably have to be an electrical engineer to even think about fixing, much less making one of my own – so now I’m trying to get more into the DIY spirit.

Tell us about one of your failed projects.
Much of my art comes out of failed and discarded science. For example I had a project which imaged the structure of a cell’s cytoskeleton using the scanning electron microscope. To actually see the cytoskeleton you have to do what’s called a detergent extraction of the membrane – basically washing away the membranes and intracellular proteins to see the underlying cytoskeleton. My project called for several such lengthy extraction protocols, to compare their efficacy. But I approached the experiments too much as an artist – too intuitively/passionately, kept changing things last minute, etc – and did not get good enough results to publish. I did however, get hundreds of images of cytoskeleton which I’ve recast as art images (see image above). Their details still fascinate me to this day. And these images have become part of my internal visual vocabulary which is very qualitative, I admit, but has informed later scientific decisions, as well as art. In short I learned a lot.

For more info check out the 2016 profile page for Jess Holz.

Meet the Makers – Milwaukee Blacksmith

Tell us about yourself.
We are a family owned and operated Blacksmith shop. My husband and four of our children work alongside us in the shop over hammer and anvil to create a variety of stock and custom items.

What are you presenting at Maker Faire Milwaukee?
We will be doing live demo of several items including how to make a Rubiks Cube Twist.

What inspires you to make?
An early love of this craft and it’s history…. and the excitement of creating something unique.

What tips or advice would you give to someone who wants to become a Maker?
Always take the leap. There is no failure. You succeed or learn. Both of those are a win.

If you could make one thing that would improve the world, what would it be?
All of our products do improve the world 🙂

For more info check out the 2016 profile page for Milwaukee Blacksmith.

Meet the Makers – Jenny of Isthmus Instruments

Tell us about yourself.
I grew up in Kentucky on a farm. When I was able, I spent all my available time outdoors. Primarily building tree-houses, boats, docks, swings, paintball courts and forts. When I was inside, I was building model airplanes or carving out of wood. Later I began playing musical instruments which funneled my building energy into music creation. I left KY to go to Northland College in Ashland, WI. After a number of jobs post college, I decided to make steps to return to what I always loved, building. What I do now is a synthesis of physical building and making music.

What are you presenting at Maker Faire Milwaukee?
I am presenting the steel instruments I build, under the name Isthmus Instruments. These instruments are a new (of the last decade) steel acoustic instrument. All instruments of this kind, (including their influence, the Caribbean Steel Pan or “Drum”) that exist in the world today have been put “into tune” by a skilled human. The art of tuning steel spans only 50 some years at this point. I have spent the last 4.5 years developing my own process of building these instruments. I didn’t learn from any one particular person or apprentice with anyone. I have had an opportunity to connect with other handpan makers in the world and share information, but even so, 90% of the progress I have made has really just been hours of grinding labor, background research and tons of trial and error.

What inspires you to make?
I am inspired to make the things that fascinate me. If I am impressed by something, I want to learn about it. The best way for me to learn about things is by doing them in some way. Musical instruments fit this category, playing and building. I am also inspired by others and their creations. I love seeing what other people make. I love finding ideas I never would have had otherwise. The experiential journey of making is full of challenging experiences. Sometimes they expose more wonder than certainty however! I think makers get even better at making over time.

What is something you’ve made that you are most proud of, and why?
I am most proud of making musical instruments out of steel at this point. It has been the hardest thing I have ever tried to do. In the aspect of making a unique musical instrument, I have developed many of my own tools in the process. All tools have had multiple revisions themselves. For instruments, I have scrap pile over 50 pieces of steel which is more hours worth of work than I can count at this point.

Why do you consider yourself a Maker?
I actually think that we all, as people, are makers on the most fundamental level. Our very existence requires maintenance. And with our evolutionary advantage of a big brain, we have responded to the maintenance puzzle with creativity. What might distinguish one group of people as “Makers”? I think makers are the people who are willing to draw up their dream on a napkin, make up all the ways to get there, and in that process, re-draw that napkin picture ten times over. And just never stop that process, on a project small or large.

What tips or advice would you give to someone who wants to become a Maker?
Don’t wait to do what interests you. Most often making something new is not smooth or pretty. And you will probably have alot of failures along the way. But you might find your strengths and weaknesses along the way as well. And you will get better with time at the whole process.

Tell us about one of your failed projects.
I wanted to make my hand drill stationary in lateral and rotational movement when cutting holes in a steel surface. The wrong position of the blade could lead to binding, which felt like a potential threat to my wrist health. I modeled a press design after other stationary press versions I had seen, but mine needed to be MUCH bigger… When I put everything together, I realized I would need much more design stability, better materials & consistency to eliminate movement. I took the failed design down and re purposed the pieces for a rolling welding table out of other odds and ends. I lovingly call that failure design, franken-table.

For more info check out the 2016 profile page for Isthmus Instruments.