Digital Diary Detailing Datamancer's Deeds

Hey everybody, Last week I had a film crew from Germany’s ZDF/3sat network come to the house to film a segment for Neues, a popular tech show. They wanted a day-in-the-life-of sort of approach so I took them down to my friends’ shop, Advanced Waterjet in Anaheim, to get a part cut, then brought it home and installed it on my in-progress new PC build, “The Clacker” (which should hopefully be finished and on the main site in a month or two). The devices on the table in the intro portion came from www.clockworker.de, a German steampunk blog.

Datamancer Steampunk on German 3sat TV from Richard Nagy on Vimeo.

To roughly paraphrase the interview portions, since I’m dubbed-over in German, in the first segment I said something similar to the text on my Computational Engine page, which is basically “Most other influential technological devices like the steam engine, radio, or television had the privilege of a “novelty period” shortly after their creation, where they were honored with ornate housings that borrowed some of the most beautiful architectural details from banks, churches, and decorative cabinetry, but the modern PC, which changed the world more than most of those inventions put together, was just stuffed into a purely functional beige cube and stuffed under a desk. I’m trying to retroactively honor the PC by giving it its day in the sun”.
In the second part, while driving down the freeway, I said, “I make most of my parts by hand, but for anything that needs a very precise fit and in particular anything that spins and needs to be perfectly centered, I have it cut on a waterjet machine”
In the third segment, in back of the Clacker projector, I can’t really make out or remember what I said, but it was probably something like, “I built a 1910s-20s Bell & Howell projector into the back of the LCD to give the impression that the projector is actually reverse-projecting the images onto the front of the screen”. Then I probably said something about design psychology and how a good design makes an artistic device look technologically feasible, and “…making it look like an actual piece of period equipment.”
I tried to shoehorn references to as many people as I could into the video but a lot of it got cut out. I shouted out Jake vonSlatt, Brass Goggles, Steampunk Magazine, and they actually shot about 5 minutes of me sitting there, listening to Vernian Process and Abney Park out of the phono horn speakers, but they cut the sound out of the shot (the scene with the visualizations on the LCD). I think you can actually hear about 2 seconds of Stigmata Martyr at the very end of the video though.

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy watching the video as much as I did making it.
-~Doc~-