The Joy (and Fear) Of Making Things
A few weeks ago my friend Brad asked me a question. Out of context, his question won't make much sense but bare with me. He asked, “How many robots have you made?” I knew the answer and immediately replied, “68,470”. His follow-up question, however, wasn’t so easy to answer. Actually, I had to write this article to figure it out.
After revealing my total number to date, his eyes got wide with surprise and he then asked “Wow... Why?”
Good question. Why do we as artists, musicians, writers, carpenters, bakers, dancers, humans do what we do, and make what we make?
Bot Story
I make robots. Actually, I paint them on tiny surfaces- the back of dominos. I painted my first set of 400 Joys Bots in 2010 for friends and colleagues. I would sit down with my pens and dominos and lose all sense of time. Creating them was a joy. Each was one-of-a-kind, hand-painted, signed, numbered, and came in a small box with operating instructions that read:
Allow your robot to get to know you by letting it watch you at your desk, kitchen, cubicle, or wherever you spend the most amount of time.
Wait till it notices something great about you (it won’t take long) and then listen while it showers you with compliments and accolades
Share it with your family/friends and create a domino effect: slowly raising the world’s self-esteem
Responses from this first batch were surprising. People would write, “You won’t believe what my robot said to me today!”, and “My robot congratulated me on running a great meeting” or it said, “Nice job helping your sister clean her room.”
These robots were “talking” to people, giving them outrageous compliments. I don’t mean literally, the robot wasn’t real. It “existed” in two places, as a doodle on a domino and in the minds of the people that experienced it. It was serving as a way for people to have a conversation with themselves. It was giving them permission to say “nice job”, “good work”, or “I’m proud of you” to themselves..
These robots were helpful, so I got curious. How else could they help? I left them on the streets for random strangers to find. I contacted the art therapy department at a local children’s hospital, and offered to donate a series of Bravebots (programmed to give instant courage to kids being admitted into the hospital). It was all an experiment. I didn't know what would happen.
I started getting emails from child life specialists at the hospital and parents describing how the Bots were helping the young patients.
Here’s an example:
“My 8.5 year-old daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. During our stay at the hospital she was given a Brave Bot. It has been such a huge help for her when getting her multiple daily injections. She carries it with her all day and keeps it by her bed at night. Such a simple concept, yet with beyond amazing powers. She holds her Bot every time she has to get an injection. Being an amazing artist herself, she has raided our domino set and started making her own Brave Bots for family and friends!”
What an amazing and surprising outcome! I started making all sorts of different Bots (Joy, Listening, Inspiration, Love, Luck, Collaboration,) not only for kids but for friends, colleagues, and organizations I was consulting for like Nike, Intuit, Apple, Mercy Corp, and others. Suddenly I was getting more requests than I could possibly handle, and I realized that I had a problem. I was a bottleneck. If I wanted others to experience Botjoy (what I started calling the project) I couldn’t make all of them myself. I had to invite others into the process. This was really hard for me. My identity was connected to the things I was making. I was signing and copyrighting everything to make sure no one was taking my ideas and images, but if this idea was really going to have an impact, I was going to have to let it go.
In the summer of 2013, I invited the world to Steal the Idea of Botjoy. I made a step-by-step video that spelled out exactly how to make a domino robot, posted it on the project website with the headline “Steal This Idea.”
At the time I had already personally made over 27,000 domino robots (now 68,470). I have kept on making them, almost blindly. It’s what I do. But the question asked by my friend a few weeks ago made me pause, and ask why I do this. I think the same question is important for anyone who is making and creating things artists and non-artists alike. Hopefully, my reflections will help you with your understanding of why you create your art.
Why paint 68,470 robots?
I like painting them
I like how people respond to what I make
It makes me feel closer to knowing who I am
I identify as someone who “creates”. Painting robots reinforces my self-image.
I am afraid of dying (more on that later).
It feels wonderful to make them and then let them go out into the world
After they are made and out of my hands I don't have any control over them.
They surprise me.
This list continues, but this feels like enough to dive into.
Reason #1: Fear
Here's a story.
The nightmares started when I was seven years old. I remember them vividly. I would be asleep lying in my bed and hear a faint scraping noise outside my door get louder and louder until the door would smash open and a giant hand at the end of a snake-like arm would come through the door, reaching out for me. It would grab me out of bed and then a huge fang filled mouth would swallow me whole. Inside I would land inside a stomach that was a graveyard filled with corpses, zombies and mummies all clawing and biting me. It was terrifying.
On those nights, I would bolt out of bed, run to my parents room and shake my father awake. He would lead me down to the kitchen, place me up on a stool at the counter, and make me cinnamon toast, my favorite. He would then pull out a pencil and paper from one of the kitchen drawers and say, “Why don’t you show me those nightmares that you are so afraid of? Why don’t you draw them for me?”
We would stay up for hours making 20 or more drawings a night. There were monsters, armies of skeletons, devils, weird beasts with wings, horns and fangs. After, my Dad and I would name them, We created: ‘Swamp Creature’, ‘Red Zombie’, ‘Giant Hand’, and others. I never wanted to go back to bed.
One night, when the nightmares were particularly scary, my dad did something different. As always, he popped in the cinnamon toast. He got out the paper and pencil and asked me to draw, but then he said:
“You know, if you can create these monsters, then you can also make them go away.”
He then handed me an eraser.
So I started to erase my drawings, and in direct correlation, the more I erased, the less vivid my nightmares became, not as important, less terrifying until with time they faded away. Almost. Almost, because they really didn’t disappear. As I got older they were just replaced by other monsters: Growing old, being forgotten, being alone, getting sick, not mattering, fear of dying.
As a child, making art helped me take some control of my fear. Today it's eerily similar. I am painting 68,470 robots to extend my life (metaphorically). I am putting a piece of myself into these images. On some deeper level I believe that if my art outlives my physical form, I am extending my existence. I don't think I intellectually believe this, but my heart wants this to be true. I get a small dose of comfort every time I put a mark on the domino as I extend the idea of myself beyond myself.
Reason #2: Being Present
Recently I have found great comfort in the idea that right now, this present moment, as you are reading these words-this is the only thing that really matters. The past is my brain reflecting on the “nows” that have already happened. The future is the “nows” that will arrive in the time ahead. Neither are “real”. What matters is what is happening at this exact moment.
Entire lives and spiritual practices have been devoted to this idea, but for the artist, there is a concrete experience of the “now” that manifests in the moment of making. We get a jolt of liberation, freedom, and focus in the moment that the pen touches the surface of the page. We not only get a profound experience of the “now”, we also get to see the “past” as we look at the lines we have just made. In addition, this extends into the future as our unseen audiences experience the work at a later date.
It's hard to put words to this idea, but capturing how uniquely “present’ I feel as I draw is one of the reasons I look forward to making robot number 56,471. It helps me to continually find my “now”.
Reason #3: Feeding the Ego
Before dominos, it was t-shirts. I would paint monsters, giant cats, and dancing idiots on the front and back of t-shirts. I sold or gave away over 10,000 of these to friends and strangers.
At the time you probably won't have ever seen me not wearing one of my own creations.
I wanted to be seen by others (and by myself) as an “artist”. At parties, where I would often feel insecure and anxious, I would wear my shirts signaling to all “I am an artist!”. I knew people would ask about the shirt. I would, in a slightly artificially humble response, feign surprise and say “oh this, yeah I paint these”. Inwardly I was thrilled that we were off and running in a conversation where I felt the most secure and the most “seen”, talking about myself.
This felt yucky, but it got me something that I desperately wanted attention.
Eventually, I stopped wearing my work as I became more aware of my motives. But has this need to be seen in a certain way totally disappeared? Umm...nope. I have to own it. My ego needs many things to feed its existence and being seen by others (and myself) as an artist is one way I make sense of myself in the world. I may have some misplaced shame around this, but I also find something grounding in the idea that there are 56,470 people on this planet that may see me in some small way as an “artist”.
Reason #4: Letting Go.
Eventually I let go of the Bots. This wasn't easy and at times still isn't. There are now hundreds of artists, students, activists making them. Some I know about, many I don't. My hope is that folks assign credit to me as the creator of this idea (makes my ego very happy) but there is no real requirement for this. It's an experiment in letting go and seeing what happens. The results have been amazing, surprising and massively gratifying.
Here's a few examples of what people are doing with the bots:
First graders making Brave Bots for ambulance drivers to give out to sick/hurt kids.
Product Designers making Silly Bots to help someone lighten up and have fun.
Second graders making Discovery Bots for scientists and astronauts.
Fourth graders making Idea Bots and sending them to writers to help them with writer's block.
Peace Bots from an international peace organization.
Artists from Paris, Madrid and Tokyo making and giving away their own Bots.
So besides the fact that this makes me feel even more immortal, I like this person, this artist, this Gary the best. This is the person who can let it go and give it away.
I see the concrete joy and help that letting it go creates. I see how this impacts all who take me up on the offer and “steal” the idea.
The answer to the question
So why am I painting 68,470 robots? Maybe in the end, it's not that I have painted 68,470 robots. It’s that we (me and the world) are, and will continue to paint them together.
