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.