News

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August 15, 2025  Steel Still Available

Here's what I've got left in steel sculpture:

• Various designs in Mini size
• 120-cells
• A 24-cell
• Klein Bottle Openers, but they're darker than normal
• Metatron
• Eggtooth
• Hypercube pendants (bronze finish only)
• Flame Alpha pendants

I'll do my best to keep this list and these pages up to date, meanwhile if you need to confirm availability feel free to email.

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August 15, 2025  Ouroboros

In other news, I went all in this year on designing for this project, a fantastical orb with fancy topology, blinky lights, and plenty of monsters. It's going to Burning Man and I am too, not sure what that's about but it's happening. I link without shame to the fundraising page, because my friends old and new have given their time and care and strength and money to bring my geometry to the playa, and maybe further festivals going forward, and it's fabulous.

A special shout out to new friend Mark Kriegsman (yes, the FastLED coauthor), who built and programmed the lights controller out of the goodness of his heart, never having laid eyes on the sculpture but in full awareness of the topology.

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July 8, 2025  Doom has struck

As of June 2025, the steel printing process I had used for the last 20 years has sunsetted: the lone remaining source has decided to repurpose those machines to other processes. This was the only way to print my designs in metal, so that is the end of this style; at least until something new happens.

I'm now collecting and counting my remaining inventory. There is still some available including Klein bottles and 120-cells, and if you're interested in a design feel free to email. While I have them to sell, I'll be pleased hook you up.

What I used was steel binder jetting with bronze infiltration. It was this. I would ask that, unless you're personally acquainted with a process that can fabricate metal with complex topology at low cost, that is not widely known, please hold on emailing to advise me that other types of binder jetting and metal sintering exist. I've checked into everything obvious and found no option that can handle these designs.

I'll be updating this site, honestly, as I'm able to face this turn of events. I suppose the market has spoken. It's hard to believe   it was undeniably the best process for what it could do, but it seems the use case was just me.

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November 1, 2024  Progress!

I've now got a source for good quality printed steel, and it's taking time to re-stock. If there's a design you'd like to see come back ASAP, drop a line and I'll see what I can do – I want to know what you think!

April 15, 2024  Steel Supply Troubles

Hello, it's been a while but yes, I'm still here. You may have noticed that many metal pieces are out of stock, and the best I can say is that I'm working on it. My supply of binder jetted steel (as it's now called) was interrupted by changes in the industry, and I'm actively searching for a new manufacturer. There aren't many people on the planet who can make these with the material and to the quality we want to see here, but there's good hope.

Prices will, I'm sorry to say, go up. I had a nice long ride – and by long I mean nearly 20 years – when the original developer of this printing technology held their startup pricing scale for me, but now I'm in the open market, and it's not yet clear where these will land, beyond that all prices will be noticeably higher. So if something you like is in stock then now might be a good time.

Thanks for continuing on this journey with me. Our dream of cheap freeform metal printing all round wasn't realized this time, but none can say what the future may hold – more news as it breaks.

December 8, 2022  Holiday Shipping

The last reasonable shopping day for Christmas arrival in the US is Sunday, December 18.

For international shipping, orders placed with Express Mail by Monday, December 12 may arrive on time, but I can't guarantee it.

My last shipping day in 2022 is Thursday December 22nd, cutoff at noon Eastern time; then I go on break until January.

Thanks for another year in making art!

Happy holidays^*!

^*if you do that sort of thing.

May 5, 2022  Repricing

After 12 years holding the line, my metal supplier (formerly Ex One, now owned by Desktop Metal) has raised prices.  It's a big hike, as one might expect after so long and in such uncertain times.  With over 60 skus here the numbers aren't all in yet, but right now it looks like jumps from 25 to 100%.

I don't like to raise prices on everything while most of my stock was still bought at the old prices, so for now this will take effect as items run out.  On the plus side I just stocked up on Klein bottles: as I write today there are 27 left, so if you need one at $66 now's the time.

I'm sorry.  Yet this day was bound to come, and the only wonder is that it wasn't years ago. 

Meanwhile I'm working every day with glass, and it's a steep learning curve, but I hope to have some good 'fusion' parts up this summer, combining glass and steel.

December 10, 2020  Holiday Shipping

The last plausible date to order for Christmas arrival in the US is Thursday, December 17.
From there I'll try to ship next day, and we can hope for postal luck.

International shipping? Again, I'm happy to ship but I can't guarantee delivery dates.

My last shipping day in 2020 is Wednesday the 23rd, cutoff at noon Eastern time.
Then I'll go on break until mid-January. My lockdown year has been all about glasswork, and I'm ready to take some time in the studio!

Thanks for staying with me through a challenging year! And if we met this year, I'm glad you're here.

Happy holidays¹!

¹as much as possible under the circs.

November 4, 2020  Inevitably, Novel Coronavirus

To my knowledge no complete structure has been published, so with the generous help of Dr Scott Monsma, Virus Scientist (more specific credit to follow) I've assembled one from the pieces. This is quite complete, including realistically supercoiled center RNA. It's not a rigidly icosahedral virus such as we usually see, instead having a flexible shell studded with curvature-mediating proteins, which changes shape when it goes on the attack. This one is just sitting quietly. Catch yours here.

October 22, 2020  Glass Quarantine

I took a left turn into glass, and now I'm casting paperweights from 3D prints with algorithmic designs. Everyone says they look like brains but you are all mistaken, they look like brain corals.
As noted above, these are mostly getting posted on social media now, and if I start selling they'll probably go up on Etsy first. (Sorry my homeslices, it's where people do their comfort shopping now...and tbh if you like my early work you might not like these. Gotta follow my star, and right now my star is fanciful sea slugs.)
This one glows in the dark. ↓

December 13, 2019  Holiday Shipping

The last date to order for Christmas arrival in the US is Wednesday, December 18. International shipping is done for the year.

My last shipping day in 2019 is Monday the 23rd, cutoff at noon Eastern time, and I'll then go on break until mid-January.

Thanks for staying with me through another year – or if we haven't met before, glad you're here.

Happy holidays!

December 13, 2019  Still Alive

I added a glass piece with orbitals – always an obvious subject, and finally I met someone with a plan to generate point clouds.

Regarding sculpture proper, please note the Now section above: I'm posting models pretty often lately, but mostly on actual social media.

May 23, 2019  Skull Time

It had to happen sooner or later, and here we are:

December 11, 2018  Generativity Continues, Also Holiday Shipping

I am still working on my generator. It's grown into a big (for me) piece of code, and I've learned some (by no means all) Python along the way. It's supposed to have some designs in a show soon, so progress may be happening. I remain interested and hope to have tangible results in the future. They're in the plan.

Generating 10,000 sculptures seems less plausible now, in that I'm no longer convinced there are that many objects worth generating in the space. I should get some hundreds at least though. And if I do get enough to need deep learning to sort them, in the course of generating I was able to abstract some properties that could be used instead of a voxelwise approach.

Meanwhile I would appreciate if someone invents an archival color printing process. Any material OK as long as the price is right, I look forward to hearing more, tyvm.

In more proximate news, here is a new glass piece with an ammonite scan. Very beautiful data, and comes with a pleasant paper.

And of course it's that time of year again.

The last date to order for Christmas arrival in the US is Tuesday, December 18th. International shipping is pretty much done for the year.

My last shipping day in 2018 will be Friday the 21st, cutoff at noon Eastern time.

And as to Shapeways, they are actually still selling prints (though their front page no longer looks like it, which is a subject of much speculation among shopowners), I still have a bunch of stuff up there, and there are still a few shipping days left on their clock.

Happy holidays!

February 6, 2018  New Project

I've been working on a big (for me) piece of code intended to generate sculpture. This is the first proof-of-concept model from it.

What's interesting to me about this is not that it's particularly great, but that it's completely automated: no hands.

My goal in this project was to write a generator that makes 10,000 sculptures, with the idea of using a neural net to pick out the good ones. Then I decided to add a few simple constraints for interestingness, just to prevent it from generating 8,000 cubes. Now I think I might not need the neural net.

This would be good because training it could be hard. I'm not sure whether encoding the models lexically would be better, or looking at them voxelwise and doing imagelike processing. I'm not sure I can round up a big enough training set of known interesting ones. And of course I'd be starting from zero knowledge, there would be a lot to figure out.

Anyway next thing is to press the button a bunch of times and see what comes out, and fix some of the stuff I left undone while getting to this minimum-viable point.

To answer your next question, I wrote it using Rhino/Grasshopper/Python.

 

December 14, 2017  Holiday Shipping Update

This year the post office is doing very poorly with international shipments. Right now I have two boxes completely lost, and more delayed, and I can't recommend any international shipments at this time. Wait till January, and your art will actually arrive!

And Shapeways is pretty much done for the year.

 

December 8, 2017  Holiday Shipping

My last shipping day in 2017 will be Friday the 22nd, until noon Eastern time. After that I take a break, returning to the office January 15th.

This is when to order to be reasonably sure your package will be here on time. I can't guarantee what the post office will do, and that's especially true for international shipments, but here's my best guess:

Priority Mail	Monday, Dec 18
International Priority Mail
Canada, Europe	Friday Dec 8
Asia, Australia	Thursday, Dec 7
International Express Mail
Worldwide	Monday, Dec 18 (Not really! Don't do this!)

And while we're at it, Shapeways has a few days left on the clock. Lots of good stuff there!

Best wishes for the season!

 

August 1, 2017  Rhinovirus

Apparently I never posted about this virus. You probably saw it already on Facebook, but for completeness: