Blog

The other day a woman who had seen my robots told me that they appealed to her because she was an Afro-futurist. I didn’t even know what that meant so I Googled it. Very cool and interesting.

The Covid pandemic has affected all of our lives in many different ways. For students finishing university it has meant getting their names read out on a Youtube video in place of a proper graduation ceremony. We wanted to make sure our daughter didn’t miss out on this important milestone so we enlisted the help of some robomofos to take the place of her university’s dignitaries and present her with her well-earned degree.

I usually make my robomofos tabletop sized because most of my customers don’t have the space to display anything bigger. But I do like to make bigger ones and I enjoy how the scale affects the way people interact with them. So I’m delighted to have just sold a big, human-scale robomofo to a party venue in the West Country. His job  is to stand in front of the record decks and use his robo-powers to get people up and dancing.

I decided on the name Robomofos for two reasons: Because the dot com domain name was available and I thought it was funny. Only afterwards did I decide mofo could stand for Made Of Found Objects. But I’m not the only person to come up with that name. Jonathan Berengut builds tiny nano robots, 2,000 times smaller than a human hair, out of synthetic dna and programmes them to link together like Lego bricks to form larger structures. They are called Bio-Nano-Robo-Mofos, But for him mofo stands for Modular Formation. Very cool and interesting.

Fan mail is not a big feature of my life. I certainly  don’t anticipate the need to hire a secretary to open, and reply to, a continuous supply of letters of adulation. In fact I’ve never received any fan mail of any kind ever. But a couple of years ago a young artist was inspired to produce a robomofo drawing which she presented to me as a gift before loosing interest and getting on with the rest of her life.

I was feeling a bit stressed this morning planning a long road trip south. I had just one robohead to finish off but before I knew it turned in to a self-portrait. Some claim the Mona Lisa is a secret self portrait so I’m in good company!

I was really impressed by these amazing robohands made by the very talented Brian Marshall of Adobtabot. So I’m keeping a look out for the same type of vintage brake levers on the old bikes dumped at my local skips. Soon I should have enough to make a pair of my own so the hands on my next robomofo will be my homage to Brian’s work.