The GolemDrone Project is a presentation of ceramic figures as if they are a new form of self defense weapon. Tod3d Industries is the small arms manufacturer of the GolemDrone self defense system, please find the complete story further down in this post.
The GolemDrone
GD132013001
FOR YOUR PROTECTION
I first came across the story
of the Golem while reading a contemporary novel. In that re-telling of the
Jewish Myth, a rabbi formed the Golem from clay into a 9-foot tall giant and
then brought it to life by writing the name of god or life on a piece of paper attached
to its forehead. This was to protect the town of Prague and its people from
anti-Jewish forces invading the village. Until this reading I had never heard
of any reference from the Judeo-Christian religions “animating” anything. The
more that I researched this mythology, the more my interest grew. The Golem was
promised as a creature that was unstoppable, defense-only, and easily
controlled. The myth concludes with the
Golem vanquishing the enemy, but he also falls in love with a woman, becomes
jealous, kills some of its own people, and eventually has to be stopped by
changing the word on his forehead to death, or removing the paper completely.
At the same time that I read
about the Golem, the United States “lost” one of its Drones in Iran. The
Iranians claimed to have hacked and plucked it from the sky. In the photographs, the drone resembles a
large toy plane, and is the color of clay.
I began rethinking the promise of the drones: they are unstoppable, they
are defense-only and could never be used against us. They are so
technologically advanced that only we can use/control them.
Continuing my research on the
Golem myth, I learned of a Golem story that gets re-told in Czech in the 1920’s
as the play R.U.R, or Rossum’s Universal Robots. This is the
first time the word Robot is used, and in the play the creatures are more like
cyborgs, flesh and machine. They run amok and throw a rebellion. I think this
is our collective fear of Drone rebellion.
Becoming more aware of the
need for a better security system at home—the rise of bike thefts on my street,
the continued break-ins into cars—I took note of other defense systems from the
past:
-The Terracotta Army of Ying
Zheng
-Voodoo dolls of West Africa
and New Orleans
-the Six Million Dollar Man
-Car alarms of the late
1980’s
When people of many different
times thought about the advances of the future, they thought “bigger, better”.
As we have seen from examples like computers, space travel, and power-tools,
the future will be smaller. By a process
that we call Mystical Miniaturization, we are able to present the GolemDrone at
only 36” in height. The Golem/Drone (GD132013001) has a target window in its
forehead. Every device comes with its first defensive target “Factory Set”,
however it is a scroll, with room for 3 or 4 more targets to be inscribed. Targets are to be of things that you or your
community need PROTECTION FROM. Targets
can be vague and general (evil, sickness, death) or can be very specific (
ex-wife or husband, badge # 36721, the tumor in my head, the rats in the
attic). In many ways this could be compared to a voodoo doll, but with better
results.
GD132013001-GD132013100
The Golem/Drone is a personal
and community defense system. Shipped to you in a wooden crate, and packed in
excelsior. Every Golem/Drone is 100% made by hand by me. Each package comes
with one figure, one controller, one wall hanger, and one manual. The GD132013001
is cast from liquid clay and fired to over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. Here at
TOD3D INDUSTRIES, I specialize in a process called “one of a kind mass
production”, which means that they are all the same, and they are all
different. The expected production run of the Golem/Drone is 100 units.