Foreword

If I ask too much of you, I am sorry.

I added this foreword to be easy because the rest of this site may be challenging.

Here are some basic facts:

Who: Ryan Futures is a human man.

What: Futures.Love is Ryan's personal website for projects and writings.

Where: Ryan lives in Toronto.

When: Ryan was born in 1989 and took the name Futures in 2024.

Why: I made this site to explain my arts and connect with people.

How: This site is made with Free and Open computer technologies, and love. See the Colophon for more details.

Contact: Please reach me by email at 💌 ryan @ futures.love 💌

I care seriously about ideas, technology, and fun.

Ideas like principles, justice, and freedom.
Technology like free software, open hardware, and robots.
Fun like adventuring, clowning, and game design.

I teach, I lead, and I invent.

I will use this site to develop all these topics and more.

Placing my work in context is difficult because I am not an expert writer or art historian.
I hope you will appreciate my humble efforts, and maintain patience with my vocabulary and your dictionary queries.

Enjoy! Critique and feedback are always welcome :)

- Ryan Futures

Hello, I'm Ryan.

This is my personal website for philosophical arts and my futures practice of cultivating visions into realities. Making things real is sort of what I'm all about, and why I have chosen the name 'Futures'.

Half jokingly, my mission is to get Earth ready to join The Federation from Star Trek.

I like to get personal and give people permission to be themselves. I love asking "What dreams are you working on lately?"

Thinking things through from first principles has become a passion of mine during my devotion of decades towards training technomancers to transmute thoughts into things using 3D printing, creative philosophy, and computer coding.

I'm trying to play the long game by advancing governance education, specifically with the Sudbury Valley School model. ¹

It's not simple or easy, so I end up on a lot of side quests.

Pictured: a creative self-portrait exercise depicting the author in the cartoon form of Steven Universe.

An old friend introducing me to a new social circle told them this:

'I know Ryan's stories sound like impossible to believe bullshit, but in my experience he is not making it up -- everything is true.'

Following my friend's introduction, I gave a report on how attending clowning classes opened the door to my job in Singapore as a fundraising party jester. It was a lot of fun to be Chief Hype Officer! I helped quadruple the value of my employer and my boss said my performance was 'magic'. This beggared belief in this new social group, but my credibility was bolstered by the fact that we had all just attended Pie Day where they witnessed me serving the Canadian Pomological Society in my role as Head Judge For Life.²

Valuing adventure, having a policy of saying yes to opportunities, and believing in the creative power of the imagination -- these are important parts of who I am and who I try to be.

I often find myself starting projects, prototyping, and leading technical organizations. I won't make this into a resume, but I'm open to opportunities involving leadership and innovation roles, and I'm happy to get creative about interim and fractional and coaching engagements.

I accept love letters and opportunity offers by email to 💌 ryan @ futures.love 💌 Please be brave! ³

What futures do you want to make real?

Footnotes:

Projects

I have too many projects to count. A light survey unearthed tons of 3D models, git repos on scattered services, half built contraptions with parts scavenged for yet other inventions, and mountains of notebooks full of designs.

With many years of prototypes and technical adventures dispersed through the aether, stored in crates, and trapped in old hard drives, the projects featured here are going to represent a very small portion of my catalogue.

We are hoping that getting articles to 100% completion will serve as a forcing function for getting projects to 100% completion. In a way, the real project is myself.

Pictured: a spiritual self-portrait exercise depicting the sculptor carving themselves out of raw materials. These two sculptures were 3D printed by fans in Brazil and Germany from Ryan's published designs.¹

It turns out that it is very difficult for me to write these articles, because the standard I try to hold myself to is unreasonably high. In the breaks I take while composing and authoring, I have managed to complete the design, prototyping, and release of entire projects excluding their writeups, so it seems I'll never catch up and the articles presented here are fated to always represent a tiny fraction of my creative output. Please savour any articles that do get published here. Look at the footnotes, look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary, really marinate in the work. Or don't, I guess I can't tell either way. Critiques welcome. I'll try to add more pictures.

Footnotes:

Lucifer (2024)

In Belgium there is a cathedral which houses one of humanity's greatest works of art, the historically controversial marble statue Le genie du mal (1848).¹ Based on this in Toronto is my Lucifer (2024), a 3D printed plastic bit of blasphemy which extends this tradition of artistic controversy into our modern context.²

Guillaume Geefs' Le genie du mal in St. Paul's Cathedral in Liège, Belgium. Protography by Danny Hellman³

I have a lifelong love affair with Freedom, and what it means to have the power to be Free. I physically escaped from a religious indoctrination facility in the 3rd grade. Police recaptured and remanded me to the principal's office, and then I learned that even the faithless fear the higher power of the state.

Institutional and religious narratives glorify blind obedience and demonize free thought, exemplified literally in demonizing the concept of Free Will with Lucifer. It is foul metaphysical legerdemain to cast the character representing Freedom as the villain! It took decades of recovery before I was able to engage positively with religious artworks, and now I'm learning to respect and reappropriate their narrative utility.

Ryan Futures' Lucifer at home in Mallo Coffee Bar in Toronto, Canada.⁴

The big pink Lucifer that sits behind the bar in Mallo’s Permanent Collection urges patrons to believe in themselves, and suggests they deserve a little treat.

I fear he may be my greatest accomplishment.

What I imagine him whispering to people as they try to order their coffee...

My gratitude is eternal to the giant shoulders I stand on, particularly Omar and the Mallo family, without whose moral and material support my work would not be possible. Thank you! There are too many shoulders to name, Guillaume Geefs, Jesus Christ, Isaac Newton...⁵

Mallo's Lucifer is close to my heart, and not just because it is the most public evidence of my having existed. To understand why, we need to delve a little into art history.

Photograph by Marwa Tawfiq Al-Kufaishi⁶

Mallo's street sign is an adaptation of Michelangelo's The Creation Of Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.⁷

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam⁸

Here we see the God Of The Covenant serving Adam a coffee with the iconic pink Mallo lid.

Enhance!

From this it follows that God is canonically a Mallo barista, with all the attendant theological implications, bringing all of Christian art and history into play.

Michelangelo's The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise⁹

The Sistine Chapel ceiling also includes The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise, where we see Lucifer in the form of the tempting snake, offering forbidden fruit to humanity. Our Lucifer has kept this piece of tasted fruit with him, along with his broken crown and shattered scepter, in his sculptural depiction.

There are many great religious works that, absent a personal religious tradition, most people never encounter. The way old works find new light shed on them intrigues me.¹⁰ Le genie du mal was introduced to the wider consciousness of the internet through an art history enjoyer's post whose origination I'm still trying to track down. The etymology of memes is not simple to follow, but this is one early example¹¹:

That's tumblr in 2022, although I have a vague personal memory of a much older and more explanatory post. Please let me know if you can shed any light on this history! I have found this twitter post with the same text from 2017:

There is a spike in the searches for Le Genie Du Mal in 2005 shown on Google Trends, and getting results from that era is increasingly challenging, so I'm making myself comfortable with potentially never knowing the complete memetic geneology during this century.

There are many people encountering Lucifer at Mallo as their first exposure, for whom tracking post history matters not at all. Will someone one day be digging through The Wayback Machine at The Internet Archive trying to date my original writings?¹² Perhaps, and only if we avoid a new dark age.

We're experiencing the early stages of a new dark age now, as link rot and enshittification already enact a regularly lamentable series of digital library burnings every year. I was able to locate an earlier May 2014 post with the help of a good friend, but it strikes me how many of its author's contemporaries have been scrubbed from their platforms, and even the posts it points to are missing in action.¹³ We're lucky to still have access to this more-than-a-decade-old post about a more-than-a-century-old statue.

It was through this memetic publicity campaign that I became aware of this particular sculpture. How many other great works have been excluded from popular consciouseness for lack of a sassy commentary thread on social media?

As an artist, the ironies of publicity were not lost on me as I bowed to the great machine and made a commercial social media account. Instagram enjoyers can follow the account made to accompany my sculpture work: @ryanmakes.ca

I chose the name 'Ryan Makes' at that time because I thought I would humbly blend in with the hundreds of other Ryans who Make. This was a foolish mistake, but resolving identity questions can be surprisingly thorny: Who are you, and who do you want to be, and how do you want the world to relate to you? At the time, I felt like I was misusing every minute I spent on self-discovery instead of putting my focus on making concrete works people could enjoy and purchase.

Not lost is the irony of failing to ask deep questions of myself while working on a piece representing the striving for sovereignty of the individual. It was only many months later when those questions resolved and I came out as Ryan Futures that I became comfortable putting up the final part of Lucifer's installation, the placard which links to this page.

It is not easy to meet oneself! I spent more time developing production techniques than I did on background research anyways. Not that I didn't buy books on John Milton and bookmark tons of essays, I just felt a pressing need to get things right and learning facts didn't seem to be helping.

Getting this Lucifer commission in shape for delivery took months of toil and sacrifice to get right. We pour one out for the printers the good Lord called home during this adventure -- they're printing with the angels now. Here's an example of one of the Lucy development models made during that time:

A small model Lucy made to test parts of the production process.

Here are some experiments in support structures that I broke many stainless steel dental tools excavating:

It is a minor miracle that I was able to get a printable 3D file without travelling to Belgium and making a scan myself. I became intimately familiar with the model I used for this print, a digital master study, and developed a hyper-awareness of the tiny differences from the marble original about which I have deeply bitten my tongue.¹⁴ I hope one day to see the original marble in person so I can document and liberate it into the digital commons. Know anyone who wants to sponsor a trip?

It is another minor miracle that I was able to source the pink PLA plastic Lucifer is 3D printed from in the correct Mallo colour. I ordered every pink I could find for sale until I got a lucky match, then ordered twenty kilograms more. He might have been printed in a hybrid metallic sheen like this development study if the fates had not been so kind:

I did manage to read all of the Sandman and Lucifer graphic novels to keep the fire inside burning while chewing through the problems this project confronted me with.¹⁵ I felt connected to the great artistic tradition of history when I broke my 3D printer and got deeper and deeper into despair as my attempts to repair it made things worse. I learned a lot about myself in that time, and about the properties of plastics and metals, and I also learned how to use a torque wrench.

Ultimately, I was able to deliver Lucifer to his new home where he is enjoyed to this day, and where he may outlive me.

One of the final lighting tests with Little Lucifer after delivering Big Lucifer to his permanent home.

Lucifer turned out great, and I'm eager to place more large installation pieces. If you know anywhere that cries out for cool custom 3D printed sculpture, please reach out to ryan @ futures.love

Intoxicated on the high of Finishing A Project, I took on an even larger project that expanded on Lucifer's success: Putting on a month long art show for a couple decades of my pieces, called Doing The Lord's Work in August 2024. That tale of biting off more than one can chew will have its own page soon. My workhorse Prusa i3 printer will get a page too.

As a final note, a recommendation: to get the full experience of this piece you may wish to order a very strong drink directly in front of Lucifer at the Mallo bar and struggle with yourself in your notebook on questions like Who am I? and Who do I want to be? and What is it all about?

Don't worry if it takes many moons and tears to arrive at answers. That's only natural - even Lucifer is crying, right? When you're ready to talk about it, reach out to invite me and I'll be happy to join you there. :)

Footnotes:

Self Made Mashup (2023)

Self-representation is an artistic drive that predates the formal study of art history. Self-improvement is older still.

Artists shown in the act of creating self-depictions, particularly the motif of the self-sculpted sculptor, are fascinating because self-creation is somehow both impossible and inevitable.

This article covers my contribution to this tradition with my spiritual self-portrait Self Made Mashup.

Following my lifelong love affair with Freedom, Self Made Mashup considers liberation in the act of self-creation, along with the inherent contradictions woven into that conceptualization. Building upon the digital and material use of Free Culture and Creative Commons works is a major axis of philosophical engagement with these themes¹. This is a very personal piece, so this will be a pretty personal article.

This is the original print that satisfied me enough to publish my models in April 2023

Liberation from ... ?

Liberation is a theme in many mythologies, religions, and beleif systems. What varies greatly is the impediment to that liberation, whether it be illusion, or suffering, or something more direct like literal slavery.

I am certainly not the first person to engage with the self-sculpted artist motif. In fact, the impossibility of unconstrained originality is one of the central themes of my Self Made Mashup.

The original concept is classic enough that we may assume I had some background unconscious exposure to some number of its many historical incarnations. My first conscious recollection of engaging with an instance of this idea is through the work of Bobbie Carlyle².

My favourite variant of the Self Made Man by Bobbie Carlyle

In addition to her versions of the stone-carving Self Made Man, there are also her variations on the clay-forming Woman in Progress. I'm partial to the variations where the woman works her clay by hand, but those wielding tools are also inspirational.

Bobbie Carlyle's Woman In Progress

Bobbie Carlyle's Woman In Process

When I first published my design files so that other people could 3D print their own copies, I gave this account of the backstory of the my relationship to this artist, and how she unknowingly put me on the path to releasing this model:

While training creative technologists, I wanted to use 3D printing a scale model of Bobbie Carlyle's Self Made Man in classroom curriculum/demonstrations. I asked for permission and permission was not given. I don't blame the artist - I blame corrupting capitalism's capture of politics including international intellectual property regimes. I selected Free and Open models for lessons and moved on.

I decided to embark on my own artistic journey and began trying to make a self made man of my own, a self-portrait of sorts. The usefulness of a wooden poseable drawing mannequin inspired me to pose a digital mannequin, and ultimately to create the red lowpoly prototype hotglue-bound to its cardboard-box carrying-case seen in the photos. I always considered this model ‘good enough’ but the project arc ‘incomplete’. It feels good, these many years later, to satisfy this artistic arc with such a fun flexible end product. Perhaps I may hope in years to return to this arc - self portraits are a periodic exercise, right?

This is the type of posable wooden mannequin which helped me immensely when I struggled to figure out how to pose myself while taking good reference photos to model from.

Red Lowpoly prototype made by posing a digital wooden mannequin, printed ~2017

I did not directly use Bobbie Carlyle's work for anything other than inspiration, but I did directly use the CC published 3D models of other artists. The abbreviation "CC" refers to Creative Commons, a liberatory legal and cultural movement that's very dear to my heart.

Exerpt from my originally published model details:

Thank you so much to everyone who helped make this possible - none of us is truly ‘self-made’ and progress comes from standing on the shoulders of giants.

The models that went into this release are:

• Mini 13 https://www.printables.com/model/422353-mini-13-printable-jointed-figure CC- BY-NC-SA
• Remixing the original Mini 13 in this release we have mashup groinplate + hips remix, CC-BY-NC-SA because Mini 13 is CC-BY-NC-SA
• Hammer from Lucky 13 Tools https://www.printables.com/model/168883-lucky-13-tools CC-BY-NC
• Remixing the wrench from Lucky 13 Tools we have the chisel. Compat CC-BY-NC-SA
• Remixing Presupported Frame remix makes this an ‘easy print', nice technique :) https://www.printables.com/model/424517-mini-13-printable-jointed-figure-frame-presupporte CC-BY-NC-SA
• Chestplate remix “Clean Armor Chest” https://www.printables.com/model/435802-mini-13-clean-armor-chest-without-13 CC-BY-NC-SA Removing the 13 designation unburdens Self Made Mashup's relationship with becoming.
• My original contribution, a cube. CC-BY-NC-SA to keep everything clean.

None of this would have been possible without these artists sharing their work, and the sharing community and culture we treasure. Thanks to a cutting edge PrusaSlicer alpha feature released two days before I needed it ( Thanks devs! <3 https://github.com/prusa3d/PrusaSlicer/issues/7594#issuecomment-1493378558 ) we have a solid .stl exported from the flexible .3mf, which is full of models from Printables and our great artists.

Self Made Mashup is released under a CC-BY-NC-SA License to be compatible with upstream CC-BY-NC-SA. It is possible both to celebrate CC and the work of open culture movements, and decry the systems which make so much trouble and labour necessary. Perhaps one day all our work and our world can be even more Free.

This shows a scene with one of the Mini 13 compatible accessories, the wings. It is part of an exploration of the quote from Michelangelo: ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’ How much can we do for others while still ourselves being works in progress?

Why call it "Mashup"? What is remixing? What is Free Culture?

At the risk of oversimplifying, a remix is an existing work reconstituted with new elements added in, and a mashup is two existing works recombined or recontextualized together. The term 'remix' comes from modern music production, while 'mashup' has murkier origins predating popularization in dadaism, but both terms are now fully integrated in the digital Creative Commons and Free Culture movement. Self Made Mashup is technically more of a remix than a mashup, but is conceptually a spiritual mashup, so I made my peace with giving it the better and more alliterative name.

Example from my August 2024 show Doing The Lord's Work of a mashup work titled Have A Seat which combines two Lucky 13 figures with furniture models made by my friend Manny using FreeCAD. In the background in pink we see my Self UnMade Mashup which crumbled under its own weight during the course of the show.

The phrase 'intellectual property' is often invoked in a vague moralistic folk understanding, but it is also a specific legal realm with many technical definitions and complications.
I'm not a lawyer and have no desire to produce an exhaustive account, but the Free Culture movement is an important part of this piece, so I'll start by sharing short introductory videos. The first is "Wanna Work Together?" from Creative Commons, and the second is "User Liberation" from the Free Software Foundation.
Once the ideologogical groundwork is laid, we'll look at the RepRap project, which is a physical manifestation of the Free Culture philosophy and represents a realization of certain post-scarcity fantasies. Please enjoy!

"Wanna Work Together?" 3 minutes
Click to watch this video in its native context at CreativeCommons.org/Share-Your-Work/

Pretty cool, and reasonably easy to understand, right?
You'll find that, as a rule, most resources I use are CC or some other kind of Free, like this next video:

"User Liberation" 3 minutes
Click to watch this video in its native context at u.FSF.org/user-liberation

The representation of computing freedom in the form of the mallet is particularly fitting to the discussion of Self Made Mashup, as all of my work is done with Free and Open tools in Free and Open culture. I would not have been able to accomplish anything in my technical career without standing on the shoulders of Free Software developers who paved the way for my success. The same is true for my artistic works, because without the Open Hardware developers in the RepRap Project I would never have had free access to 3D printing, and RepRap itself would not have been possible without the work of the Free Software and Free Culture movements that came before it.

My heart overflows with gratitude to think of these wonderful gifts, and it is my joy to pass on and teach these treasures to the next generation, and make my own humble contributions where I can. When I'm not teaching formal classes, I greatly enjoy volunteering at the Innovation Hub at the Toronto Public Library's Reference Library, which is where I got my start 3D printing. Helping people turn their thoughts into things for the first time is so exciting!

I would be remiss in failing to share "Wealth without money...", a video introducing the origin and mechanics of the RepRap project, because the 3D printer I used to produce Self Made Mashup is a RepRap itself. Note that the utopian vision of Star Trek and its fictional replicator really did directly inspire the creation and distribution of an incredible amount of wealth, so we must conclude that working on and developing and sharing those ideas was truly deeply valuable. Ideas are the first catalysts for change, and collaborative imagination is the path to better futures³. I comfort myself with this as a justification whenever I find myself admonished for spending too much time on utopian daydreaming.

"Wealth without money..." 8 minutes
Click to watch this video in its native context at RepRap.org/wiki/About

I'll briefly show a little of my RepRap 3D printer setup for context. All the orange parts, and many of the black and grey parts, are 3D printed on a nearly identical i3 machine, if not this actual machine itself.

This is my 3D printer in its enclosure, a Prusa i3 MK3S+ with a handful of upgrades. I chose not to clean it up for this candid photo to enhance this article's honesty and realism. Shout out and a big thank you to my dear friend E, without whom none of this would have been possible for me.

See the custom camera mount on the left that I remixed from existing available designs, which I prototyped and iterated on until I got the camera angle just right for my print monitoring and timelapses.

This is the Free Software frontend Octoprint, the 3D printer's web interface, showing the live output of the camera during the 28 hour printing of some Self Made Mashup parts. It's running in a Free Software web browser Firefox, on a Free Software operating system Fedora. Freedom stack!

This is a timelapse generated by taking a picture of each layer of the printing of the golden Self Made Mashup in the first photo of this article. The Ema.works imprint is because I named the printer Ema and I love URLs and logo design too much. I added a little extra sauce to give it a nice loop. When everything was working, every print would have a timelapse automatically uploaded to Ema's Mastodon account on botsin.space, but an Octoprint software update messed up my scripts, and then finally botsin.space was taken offline for price and complexity headaches by its charitable administrator. This timelapse was rescued before the server was sunset.

I built a flyaround turntable rig with the intention of scanning everything I made to accompany every timelapse post. As we see from the video quality and the fact that the subject is lying on its back, making an automated content machine of sufficient size and capability to impress the internet is not easy. Many parts for this rig were salvaged from a proprietary 3D printer that was being given away for free because it was unusably riddled with DRM (Digital Rights Management, a euphemistic bit of nastiness designed to be hostile to humans) and I tried in vain to liberate it before conceding in sadness that it had to be dismantled. It's nice to see donated parts given new life in projects which, for the most part, actually work.

My tooling and machines deserve their own page, and they may get it, but we'll return to the sculpture at hand for now. I allowed myself some linguistic flourish in my original release of my models, and I can't resist duplicating here my use of the word 'foreclosed':

The tension from combining themes of ‘personal responsibility and accountability’ with premeditated form is an invitation to examine the possibility space of the individual as a function of environment, and how possibilities can be created or foreclosed at the societal level as well as the personal.

Just as the self-sculptor cannot carve stone with bare hands and must have been supplied with hammer and chisel somehow by an unseen benefactor, so too have I been furnished with a wealth of tools. I physically assembled and calibrated and upgraded my 3D printer, but I did not design it. All this detail is to make the point that individuals are not distinct from their societies or their place in history. In recognition of this, I try to 'pay it forward', starting with publishing Freely. What a joy it was to find that my work was printed by enjoyers internationally when they posted their photos and gratitude online!

These two sculptures were 3D printed and shared by fans in Brazil and Germany!

It is difficult to overstate my immense pride and satisfaction at having my work replicated and appreciated by Free Culture enjoyers around the world. The drive to better oneself is universal, and I like to think my small contribution to the inspiration of our fellow human beings will ripple and echo through history. I wrote the following before I knew my work would be seen by anyone, and I'm happy to see that I'm not alone in my sentiments:

The practical materialization of ideas using 3D printing technology with Free and Open hardware, software, and culture unlocks new paths for each of us to imagineer and manifest new ways of being in new worlds. Meditations on method and medium inform Self Made Mashup's inherent contradictions, pointing toward a path forward together.

Conceptions of Freedom

Returning to the artistic context of Self Made Mashup, Technological Freedom and Cultural Freedom are far from the only types of Freedom the self-sculptor motif has been used to represent.

Psychological freedom is one of the more popular concepts represented with the self-sculptor motif. This carries with it the related concept of freedom from received conditions, of taking agency over one's life. One quote is by far the most common pairing with this motif:

"Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor" ― Alexis Carrel

This quote is so inspirational and resonant and fitting that it is a natural combination with the self-scultor motif. It reads as though the author is discussing the individual, but another possible reading is discussing the collective. Whether the original author was arguing for eugenics may complicate our deeper enjoyment of this quote. However, I strongly doubt that most of the people composing inspirational posters with those words are cognizant of the author's cancellable opinions, so we'll keep our focus on the individual.

The individual emphasis on difficulty, hardship, and suffering as the price to be paid for asserting one's own self-definition is a widely popular one in other contexts as well, like discipline and physical fitness and stoicism. Note the introduction of the singular article in the following composition - no longer 'man', but instead 'A man'.

We even find it in the form of tattoos! There are dozens of people with similar tattos, but I'll just show one with the quote, and a bonus video of a tattoo actually being applied to a man's flesh.

This is a powerful image and potent metaphor that many people find personally meaningful and motivational. My enjoyment of it is complicated after reading the original Nobel Prize winning author's book where he makes it very plain it's about eugenics, but this is pretty common for common sentiments, like hearing someone excuse misdeeds committed by 'a few bad apples'.⁴ If I explained everything to everyone every time they abused an aphorism I'd be an idiot for idioms and never get anything else done. I am resigned now, as much as I am able to restrain myself in the moment, to 'just let people enjoy things'.⁵

Inspiration is Relative to Ambition

Inspirational media and I have a long relationship. In fourth grade math class, I hung a demotivational poster of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to express my deep disapproval. It so well blended in with the rest of the material on the walls that it remained there for years without being removed. The thing I studied most in that classroom was how much disruptive trouble I had to make in order to be kicked out, so that I could sneak into higher grade math classes.

This is the poster I hung in protest to insult my school, only to find it could give no insult because it matched the ambitions of the institution.

I wanted very badly to be be free to do better, and learn more, and take my place in the ranks of history's great men, many of whom had gotten in trouble in math class before discovering and inventing new kinds of mathematics. What I intended as an insult to those people and systems that were holding me back, others saw as a comfort or an inspiration. The teachers that filed in and out of that class saw it every single day, hanging prominently over the classroom, and never removed it. It remained in place for years! Obviously not everyone shares the same motivations and aspirations. Where do personal standards spring from?

What do people really find motivational? What do we see when we think of our best and highest selves? Most of the self-sculptors are depicted as fit and muscular. One of my favourites, as an on-again off-again member of the double chin club, is this version where a couple carves themselves out of obeisity. I like the idea that we can carve away the mistakes of the past.

Freedom from fat, and maybe also freedom from sloth and unhealthsome habits. Artist: Víctor Hugo Yáñez Piña

Religious inspiration

Self Made Man in a 'snowglobe', surrounded by 'diamonds', inspired by the story of Moses carving the Tablets of Law and coming away rich in gems.

There is another popular tale of a man shaping stone, carving the laws of a new future for his nation. In the book of Exodus, the biblical prophet Moses carved the foundational commandments of his people, and became rich in the act. Not just spiritually rich, but skilled in the art of working gems, which he happened to have found himself with an incredible amount of through the creation of the God's tablets. This story was part of my inspiration for creating another version of my Self Made Mashup in a snowglobe.

This illustration depicts Moses defeating the Egyptian army by drowning them in the sea through divine intervention. Moses was an inspiration to Benjamin Franklin and the founders of the United States of America, who proposed this drawing for their Great Seal. ⁶ This stands in start contrast to the Coat of Arms of Canada on which we find an enslaved unicorn chained and collared by a monarch's crown.⁷

After winning a slave rebellion guerilla war in Egypt and plundering all the local precious metals, Moses goes up the holy mountain to recieve God's laws on sapphire tablets. When he comes down the mountain and sees his people have turned the looted gold into an idol, he smashes the tablets, grinds the statue up and forces people to ingest it, and then commands a purge. Out of some six hundred thousand men, three thousand are put to the sword! When he sets about carving a new set of tablets, scholars record that the sapphire offcuts produced in the process make Moses rich. As all the happenings of the text are understood to have deep metaphorical meaning in addition to their literal meaning, one interpretation is that following God's commandments (carving the tablets) gives a wealth of incidental benefits (sapphire offcuts).

Self Made Mashup in snowglobe presented next to his brothers at my show Doing The Lord's Work, August 2024

I'm not going to go super deep here in biblical exegesis and hermaneutics, even though I did read the entire book of Exodus and a bunch of commentaries to make sure I wasn't spouting bullshit here, but basically the core idea is this: The act of carving produces an embarassment of wealth in gems, all which pale in comparison to the real treasure of truth. For Moses, God's truth outshines a fortune in sapphires, and for the Selfmade, owning your own self and being who you choose to want to be outshines any outward attainment like muscles or reputation.

I had wanted to do some experimental snowglobe type pieces for a while. I saw a black snow Chernoble fallout snowglobe that inspired me years ago and have had my eye out for novel snow types since then. I had the hollow globes ready in my lab, and when I found how fragile and difficult to transport my self made mashup was, I tried making a snowglobe. It was a moderate success, and the experiments with varying fluid viscosity and gem bouyancy were fun.

Ultimately, the prototype was successful in teaching me many things. The latest lesson has been about underwater glue and the importance of weighing things down even if you think they've been secured by adhesive. Here we see the base floating to the top of the globe, forever hanging our little buddy upside down. Oops!

I'm probably not going to make too many more snowglobes.

Vintage Memes

My search for other images and conceptions of the Self Made Man led me to a book of religious-flavoured wisdom comics which includes a page by that title. I beg the reader's patience as I show selected excerpts from Fifty great cartoons by Frank Beard (1890)⁸, each an illustration and its accompanying text.

Orginally I introduced it like this:

Crazy final secret bonus - Research unearthed this meme from a more enlightened age:

Despite the faiths being separated greatly in time and doctrine, these cartoons were created as works of faith, and Self Made Mashup is a manifestation of faith in practice. Coincidence can be consilience in faith works, as all true pure faiths share a core of light.

The entire book is great, but a little dated. Today it might be cancellable for caricaturing immigrants as "moral sewage" guilty of "sabbath desecration". It laments the state's impossibility of righteousness "so long as it remains in an unholy league with the licensed saloon".

"... No evils threaten greater menace to the nation than those which are embodied in the rum traffic and in corporate bribery. ..."

It's quaint. The modern attitude would say that any kind of faith is quaint. I am not a Christian as such, but I did commune with Jesus in a psychedelic vision once, and I will say he got a few important things right. I like this quaint book, and I think you'll see why.

I'll skip over the majority of it, but there are four drawings I'd like to discuss, and since I have neither space constraints nor an editor, you're about to become acquainted with them. I hope you'll appreciate my restraint at showing only four of fifty comics!

Our first exerpt page The Richest Man In The World contrasts and follows the page The Poorest Man In The World which shows a dapper shipwrecked fellow with a safe full of gold and corpses at his feet of his perished former attendants Faith, Hope, and Love.

I'm sure the artist would call my interpretations of his work shallow, or blasphemous, or vain, but The Richest Man In The World's diamond of Salvation, obtained with the pickaxe of Faith and Works, matches in my mind with the gems in my snowglobe, the sapphires of Moses, and my theme of determination against temptation. My salvation is from addiction, despair, obeisity, and is ultimately the salvation of being able to trust in the commitments I make to myself. There's a scene in To Kill A Mockingbird where an old woman purposefully puts herself into withdrawal on her death bed so that she can “leave this world beholden to nothing and nobody”, and while I have made great progress against chemical dependence on stimulants, there is yet much deeper work for me to do in my relationship with food, and deeper still my relationship with myself. All the metaphors somehow find themselves tied together as I work towards liberation.

Our theme of self-portraiture comes in many flavours, this time it is As Conscience Paints Him. I look myself in the mirror as part of my daily checklist, and the more uncomfortable it makes me the longer I force myself to stay and confront myself. I'll often try to smile at some piece of progress and tell myself to "keep going", and when it gets particularly hard, I'll put on a reading of Guy In The Glass ⁹, though I like 'Man' better than 'Guy'.

The Man In The Glass - by Peter Dale Wimbrow Sr.

When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day
Just go to the mirror and look at yourself
And see what that man has to say.

For it isn’t your father, or mother, or wife
Whose judgment upon you must pass
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the one staring back from the glass.

He’s the fellow to please – never mind all the rest
For he’s with you, clear to the end
And you’ve passed your most difficult, dangerous test
If the man in the glass is your friend.

You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years
And get pats on the back as you pass
But your final reward will be heartache and tears
If you’ve cheated the man in the glass.

Querying the internet for examples of self made men is what led me to discover this book, through this image in particular. The foolish vanity in thinking of oneself as fully independent is directly germane to what my piece is about, so this find is quite satisfying.

Finally we come to the motif of the sculptor, in a piece that well represents my own wishes for my self-development that I'm trying to express and channel through my sculpture. The man with the chisel is hunched and humbled, but his scultpure of himself is upright and noble as he liberates it from tribulation, temptation, and all the other impediments to his character, through the use of love and truth. It is curious that the same few metaphors and images are found in the treatment of self-development. Is it consilience, or is it a case of "Great minds think alike, but fools rarely differ"? I may find myself in a future project catalogueing the metaphors and images presented in intended works of wisdom, in a spiritual and methodological cross-pollination between my narrative development practice and the wisdom literature review of The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People.

Aspirational Self Portraiture

This variation stands out to me for being set in a natural pile of stone instead of a block prepared for sculpting. It is also uncommon in depicting the figure as bald.

We have touched on so many conceptions of freedom and agency, but the one most prominently important to me is a certain kind of emotional psychological freedom, and with it a freedom from the past. There is a fitting image of one of my winged selfmades half-way to liberation.

Half way to liberation.

Chisels for Everyone!

This is the sculpture I finalized while writing this article. I enlarged it to %800 of the original work's size and added a new base for wall mounting. It is impossible to ignore, occupying the most central part of my living space. For scale, I included the gold %100, left %200, and right %400. If I ever choose to go bigger, I'll need to either use a larger 3D printer, or print pieces in chopped-up parts and assemble them.

Seeing this piece looming over me every day reminds me to work to become the man I want to be. So far we have a pretty positive relationship, so it's working. I consider this quite lucky, because many of my favourite sculpture portraits are darkly sad, like the statue in the Ozymandias ¹¹ poems, for example, or the WORLD'S GREATEST INVENTOR statue in my favourite short film Mark Osborne's MORE¹². I keep a Trophy of Perpetual Futility inspired by Cat And Girl¹³ on my mantle with the Ozymandian inscription, to remind me not to become swept away with worldly attainments. I exhibited it on the same shelf as my selfmades at the show I keep mentioning, which I promise will get its own page here eventually. I also make a point of rewatching MORE at least once a year, to make sure I remain connected with my dreams and don't put too much of myself into my work. In a funny coincidence, the MORE DVD contains a commentary track by the founder of the company Despair, Inc. that sold me the Mediocrity demotivational poster.

My Trophy of Perpetual Futility sitting in the center, flanked by such notable figures as Guan Yu, Julius Ceasar, Lady Liberty, and Rodin's Thinker in Duchamp's Fountain.

I originally intended here to discuss Escher, and Strange Loops, and Arnold Schwarzeneger's speech "I am not a self made man", and Benjamin Franklin's account of Divine Providence, and the Noun Project's icon for Intellectual Property Theft and 'getting carried away with an idea', and how I ring a singing bowl and channel my saintly grandmother's final gift to me, her joyous smile, and Calvin and Hobbes, and my workout goal of being able to perform an action hero's helicopter rescue maneuver, and...

... And maybe part of sculpting my spirit involves becoming a more ruthless editor of my own writing.

Is that really who I want to become?

Since self-portraits are a recurring exercise, and since I know I haven't made my last print of this sculpture, it's certain I'll be returning to revise this article sooner or later.

Thank you for coming this far with me. If you are inspired and you would like to have your own Self Made Mashup of any size for your home or anywhere else, it will be my pleasure to assist you.

I want to be the kind of man who hands out chisels and teaches others how to use them.

Perhaps next I'll make some tools, engraved with the words "None of us is Free until all of us are Free."

Endnotes

I promised that I would stall no further and publish this on April Cools Day (April 1st 2025, an alternative framing for the Fool's Festival) so I have left some mess to clean up and notes to myself here that, if the fates should bless me with tomorrows, I will clean up. For now, I'm keeping my word and hitting publish so I can get some feedback about this article's next more final draft.

Upload the 800%+base-wallmount files, and update to add a link to this article.

Maybe add your writing in your artists statement for your show Doing The Lord's Work

A note on the history of self-portraits, and this image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Self-Portrait

The last image can be of your final version (for now) hanging on your wall, alone.

Consider putting up a placard with QR, enough to say Self Made Mashup, 2025, PLA plastic, Ryan Futures, URL.

I may apply for some arts funding and make a larger-than-life installation piece for a festival, but for now I'm happy to declare victory on this Self Made adventure and move on to my next article.

See if you can date the original lowpoly selfmademannequin by logging into tinkercad?

You also need to put up a page for your futures practice to let people put their info in a form, at least. Maybe your booking link is a good start.

make links clickable, move to footnotes

https://wikidiff.com/remix/mashup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(culture) https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/22/from-artistic-to-technological-mash-up/ https://lessig.org/product/remix/ https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/your-collection/mashups-and-the-birth-of-modern-culture https://dltj.org/article/mash-up/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Carrel https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video

https://www.reprap.org/wiki/RepRap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap https://www.reprap.org/wiki/About

Order of sections: First paragraph saying this article is a companion piece to my sculpture, and explores the artist's motivation and art-historical context. Self-awareness as an evolutionary innovation, strange-loop/G.E.B. and stoned ape theory mention. History of self-portraiture. Agency, operating on oneself and one's ambitions, the motif of the self made man. Communion with self narrative, communion with divine narrative The artist's place in history, and the narrative of technological and cultural improvement and continuity Types of freedom Iterations/versions of the sculpture

reference for the Moses sapphire mine https://jewishvues.com/articles/eikev-the-chips-of-your-life-will-make-you-rich-why-would-moshe-make-money-from-carving-the-second-tablets/ and the direct text: https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.34.1?ven=english|The_Contemporary_Torah,_Jewish_Publication_Society,_2006&lang=bi&aliyot=0 and commentary: https://www.sefaria.org/Vayikra_Rabbah.32.2?lang=bi

The 4 image quote composition labelled "the art of purpose" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_on_the_Pale_Horse , something like but not exactly this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnese_Hercules ah it was the same character but a different sculpture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_and_Cacus, and finally Carlyle's Self Made Man https://www.bobbiecarlylesculpture.com/SelfMadeMan.php . I found the original composer's post as well https://x.com/creation247/status/1859695082477322295

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_(Michelangelo)

Missing so far: Escher, Calvin and Hobbes, and the More short film, and maybe Capitalist Realism for good measure.

Colophon

“When we hold our own keys, None can expel us from paradise.”

This Colophon is UNDER CONSTRUCTION but has to be posted so it isn't a dead link from the Foreword.

The author Ryan Futures can be contacted through emails sent to ryan @ futures.love. Public key information for encrypted communications can be found at https://pubkey.futures.love/

Ryan is afflicted with philosophy, so he is blessed and/or cursed to know words like 'colophon', which is normally the part of a book that describes the author's manner and intention in publication. This colophon describes how Futures.Love (the site you're reading now) is published.

With faith that there is a deep relationship between means and ends, the tools chosen for this adventure preferentially Free as in Freedom. The same is true for most parts of most projects detailed here, and in general for the things the author allows into his life.

Futures.love is a combination of a deep stack of technologies and services tied together:

Git, MarkDown, Rust's mdbook, HTML+CSS+JS, Codeberg, DNS, and the whole package of technologies we call 'The Internet', including the browser you're using to render this on your device. Stacks of Free Software including flavours of GNU and Linux, GIMP, Krita, Firefox, and a thousand supporting tools also played their parts.

The content is hand-written in MarkDown, (organic artisinal wordsmithing, never touched by synthetic generation or AI slop) which is compiled to HTML+CSS by mdbook.

The source and build content is stored in a git repository, (source repo https://codeberg.org/ryanfutures/futures-dot-love-development ) and the git host being used is Codeberg.

The website itself is being static-hosted by Codeberg Pages. (serve repo https://codeberg.org/ryanfutures/pages)

The domain name is being held for Ryan by a registrar that points the DNS records at Codeberg so your browser can resolve the content correctly.

Stated in a more specific narrative way:

Ryan writes the content in MarkDown format in the default text editor Xed on Fedora Linux 40 (Cinnamon) on his daily driver FrameWork 13 DIY.
Those page.md files are committed to Git using the default console the GNOME Terminal.
That terminal is also running mdbook as a server and viewing the live output in Firefox to help get the content right.
That Git repo is then pushed up to Codeberg.org which is running the software forge Forgejo.
I'm not using CI/CD with this setup, so I'm manually running mdbook to compile the markdown to a static website made with simple html+css+js. With the compiled site in hand, I'm again using Git and Codeberg to enable hosting with Codeberg Pages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colophon_(publishing)

Technology icon/logos!