Well, as Terhi, Tapio, and Liisa and I begin working on our net.sauna project for the Ars Electronica festival in September, I suddenly have to laugh as a memory from the surfacing of a deep personal history. I think I was around seven or eight years old,
living in Clarksburg, Maryland, in the rural suburbs of Washington, DeeCee. The Clarksburg Elementary School that I attended had an annual community festival each fall. For one of these events, I think it was in the fall of 1969, my friend Peter and I decided to do a project. In vogue with the fact that we were both sons of engineers, and that computers had landed two men on the moon that previous summer, we embarked on the construction of a large device that we dubbed The ElectroThinker. We crafted it from a large refrigerator box, painting it blue and grey and yellow, and attaching as many Lights and switches and knobs and such as we could collect from my fathers cluttered workshop and elsewhere. There were various electric bells and noisemakers. Of course, the heart of the machine — a machine that could answer any question for the small sum of a nickel, five cents — the heart was the imaginations of two kids writing answers on small scraps of real(!) computer paper and making some strange speaking sounds. My own memory fails to recall how much money we made, but the event itself is a small evidence of the impact that my cultural and social upbringing had on my relationship with machines, computation, and technology. The second instance that comes to mind following this remembrance is the time that one day, when foraging near the ruins of an old cabin — a place I rarely went for the profusion of poison ivy and snakes — I came across the intact trans-axle of a very old Ford truck. It had the wheels, tires, differential and some kind of transmission box. I was consumed with the mission to deconstruct this device and see what was inside it. I must have been only ten or eleven if that. I remember taking all my father’s heavy wrenches, hammers, chisels, whatever I could in a wheelbarrow into the woods, and spending a number of days hammering, unbolting, chiseling at this thing until I had taken most of it apart. I was rewarded by a huge collection of shiny gears, Timken® taper bearing sets, and assorted solid brass bearing axles — all which I cleaned up carefully with gasoline and displayed in my room.