KlausKommoss
Engineering 3 - Making jewelry out of it
A necklace made of resistors.
After only 6 years as an engineer I thought I had enough and wanted out to look for my own style, my own life. I had all the success I could have dreamed of, they paid me tons of money and offered enough more to make me dizzy. It was great, but – not surprising to me, only to all the others – the attraction of it all remained limited. When my engineering career started to take off and soar but had lost its initial intriguing attribute of adventure I wanted to get out.
Sometimes then, in my spare time, I found myself making necklaces out of fragments of these tape player mechanisms I designed. Stuff I had myself created for very serious and absolutely non artistic purposes, stuff I surely had put my heart blood into and which – I was unsettled to see this – stared back at me now as pieces of my very own identity.
Looking back, this little playful practice at that time of making jewelry was tremendously therapeutic for me. To look at my engineered stuff from such a totally different perspective was like a revelation. Little metal pieces like springs, washers, bearings, nuts, and other utterly inappropriate objects like electronic resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits, and connectors became art. A little spiral-shaped gear wheel, that had a highly academic background and once was the solution for a huge technical problem and had gained me a lucrative patent and fame in certain circles, became an intriguing adornment for beautiful women. A series of bronze bearings of a new exotic material, that had bizarre cracks all over and given me great headaches because it never worked, looked incredibly decorative around a female neck.
Once the ban was broken, there was no stopping to “abuse” my creations for artwork. What had originally been a problem was suddenly a solution, what had a rational purpose before had now a charm. And of course, just to rediscover such ambivalence of almost private things was instructive and actually a wonderful relief. Maybe it was the silent message I gave to myself: “Hey, don’t get trapped in this identity of a smart engineer who is thinking up ‘noise making machines‘ no one really needs. And, when you see something, look again from a different angle, and keep wondering what it really is.”
Engineering 3 - Making jewelry out of it
A necklace made of resistors.
After only 6 years as an engineer I thought I had enough and wanted out to look for my own style, my own life. I had all the success I could have dreamed of, they paid me tons of money and offered enough more to make me dizzy. It was great, but – not surprising to me, only to all the others – the attraction of it all remained limited. When my engineering career started to take off and soar but had lost its initial intriguing attribute of adventure I wanted to get out.
Sometimes then, in my spare time, I found myself making necklaces out of fragments of these tape player mechanisms I designed. Stuff I had myself created for very serious and absolutely non artistic purposes, stuff I surely had put my heart blood into and which – I was unsettled to see this – stared back at me now as pieces of my very own identity.
Looking back, this little playful practice at that time of making jewelry was tremendously therapeutic for me. To look at my engineered stuff from such a totally different perspective was like a revelation. Little metal pieces like springs, washers, bearings, nuts, and other utterly inappropriate objects like electronic resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits, and connectors became art. A little spiral-shaped gear wheel, that had a highly academic background and once was the solution for a huge technical problem and had gained me a lucrative patent and fame in certain circles, became an intriguing adornment for beautiful women. A series of bronze bearings of a new exotic material, that had bizarre cracks all over and given me great headaches because it never worked, looked incredibly decorative around a female neck.
Once the ban was broken, there was no stopping to “abuse” my creations for artwork. What had originally been a problem was suddenly a solution, what had a rational purpose before had now a charm. And of course, just to rediscover such ambivalence of almost private things was instructive and actually a wonderful relief. Maybe it was the silent message I gave to myself: “Hey, don’t get trapped in this identity of a smart engineer who is thinking up ‘noise making machines‘ no one really needs. And, when you see something, look again from a different angle, and keep wondering what it really is.”