Gasifier Experimenters Kit

Untitled Documentwhether food or fuel, animals or engines, it is the same chemicalprocess, partaking of the same inputs, exhaling the same exhausts.fuel, machines and fire as the synthetic forms of food, body andrespiration. hmmm . . . sounds like an up and coming burning mantheme, minus the green-meanie thing . . .oddly, the early part of the history of immitating the animalrespiration with mechanical heat engines was fed with mostly biomasssources- from whale oil to veg oil to wood manufactured gaseous fuelsto sweage digested methane. only very late in the project didunderground petro based stuff become viable and so densely sourcedthat all the rest was soon forgotten, and its bio immitative originsconcealed. which oddly, is all that is reappearing currently as wehave found various issues with petro sourced hydrocarbons and areworking to reorient our machines of artifical respiration towardsother sources of oxidation ready input.so somewhere in all of this, the project to save the world seems to besome sort of artistic mashup of the man/machine metabolic/pyro soupwith the general aesthetic and pleasures of 50/60s gearhead hotrodculture. and big fire art of course, fed with esoteric organic fuels.biotech not as a medical idiom or project of physical flesh synarchitecture, but as a play and creative engagement with the sensualpleasures of mechanical metabolism, fire and noise, as manifestedthrough the v-8 and its fuel/food preps.all in all, this alt energy thing really shouldn't be a hippieludditite green narrative of sin and renunciation of consumption, butrather a geek hack project of manipulating artificial life machinesand their variable bio/syn fuels. a lego code hack of organicchemistry. ingesting municipal trash, tires, wood waste andagricultural debris to produce the usual heat to mechanical energy toelectrical energy that has fueled most of the gig for the lastcentury, but mostly invisibly, and without much concern for the largercycles in which this energy exchange partakes.i'm finding the positive artificial life play with the wild diversityof carbon transactions, reckoned through big machines and fire, to bevastly more interesting than any environmental narrative of guilt andsin i've yet to hear. that all this should be drag racing and opensource code hacking in the service of creative play, self-expressionand general competitive customization, done in social ground uphttp://whatiamupto.com/mechabolic/mechabolicthesis.html (2 of 9) [10/9/2008 08:16:56]