So my name is Mark Fraunfelder and I'm a writer and an illustrator and an editor and
a maker of things.
I'm editor-in-chief of a magazine called Make Magazine.
It's basically a technology project magazine where we show people how to make all sorts
of really fun things.
I've always loved that punk aesthetic of being able to just do things yourself.
You don't necessarily always have to buy a solution to every problem or need that you
have.
You can make, modify, or fix the stuff that you already have when I was younger.
I was really into like doing chemistry and electronics projects with my dad because he
was an electrical engineer.
As I started getting a little older I really got into illustration and cartooning and then
I discovered zines.
I just thought I've got to do my own zine.
And so I thought it would be fun to do boing boing like bouncing around from idea to idea.
The first issue just had a hundred copies and people really seemed to like it.
So I quit my job as a mechanical engineer.
I was able to basically make like starvation wages doing a zine.
So anyway, when I was working at Wired in the later 90s I decided to do a profile of
Kevin Mack because he was the visual effects supervisor for Fight Club.
A lot of his special effects evolve kind of these genetic algorithms.
He just like plants a seed in a way, an algorithmic seed that just starts creating its own branches
and grows.
So this is called God Loves a Math Joke.
Well for me it's all about exploring the polar opposites of things and trying to dissolve
the boundaries between them.
So like these are simultaneously abstract and photoreal.
It's that threshold between order and chaos.
It's exploiting the same process that happens when we're looking at clouds and we see animals
and faces.
We all have that tendency of finding meaning.
Then he started discovering 3D printing and the fact that you could take these genetic
algorithm shapes that were like 3D computer art and turn them into real 3D objects.
And the cool thing is there's no other way you could make these objects because they're
so intricate you couldn't get tools inside them, you couldn't cast them.
The only way you could do it is by his process.
I love when I can be like a mad scientist and take tools and utilize them rather than
just use them like apply them in ways they were never meant to be used.
It's like I can make my imagination physical you know.
To me avant garde means somebody who is at the forefront of a movement.
And so I immediately thought of Kevin because what he's doing is artwork that hasn't really
been done by anybody else before, which I think he's paving a new way for artists to
express themselves, which really is what avant garde is to me because it's the advance of
a garde.
There's more than one person.
Being an artist has been a search to be able to contribute to the conversation of art
and I think I'm on to something.
