The Life and Times of my Meat Baby (Patreon)

So, this past weekend was Maker Faire.  For the third year now, my collaborator Mark and I loaded the car with 100 robots and drove to the Bay Area to spread the word of our robot uprising.

In addition to showing off our Light Play installation, I had a gig in the Jack Links booth presenting a delta robot I had made for them out of their meat products. Between my neon children in the dark room and my newly gestated cyborg meat-machine... I was quite a busy mother.

Once I arrived in San Mateo to set up for the show, I had to build the meat child from scratch. It was my third time making a robot out of meat products, but unlike the first two renditions, I for some reason took for granted that California's super markets would supply the same Jack Links sausage product I had planned on using for my structural arms... which they DIDN'T. This left me to make do with an alternate tube-meat snack of theirs. Its material properties however turned out to be quite a bit different than the tested kind, in that it was about 60% bright orange fluid. O_o

Once the robot was in action, the holes where I penetrated the ends of the arms literally gushed with juice... as if it were bleeding... and then it quickly shredded itself into a pile of orange shiny sticks. 

I spent a good portion of the show performing surgery on my little meat baby; reinforcing its broken body with more and more tape (which I used like rope because it couldn't stick to anything due to the oil), and tooth picks... which were used as struts.

By Saturday the robot was more or less indestructible. YAY! So, no amount of floppy meat can slow me down... heh.

I made a series of videos about this whole jerky adventure. I encourage you to check them out if you want to laugh today:

How this all got started, my meat delta for HeboCon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqcnNeRYrpM

Experimenting with the meat medium:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCuPU5-ObT0

Trying to Adhere Meat to Itself with Glue...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHz51XsGg0o

The Meat Delta Alive in the Jack Links Booth at Maker Faire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VwIgDWUJjk

In another week or so, Jack Links will be releasing their documentary on this entire Hangry Hacks experience. I will post the link when this happens, so you all can see the meat-flavored madness. =]

-Sarah