Maker needs Shop to build Steampunkery
Donation protected
Dear ladies and gentlemen:
Some of you already know me from the Steampunk circles I frequent, but for those who do not, let me present myself. My name is John Dunn, AKA J. "Wilhelm" from the fair City of Austin, in the Republic of Texas. For me Steampunk was always a hobby, and little did I know that one day it would become my lifeboat, so to speak. For those of you who haven't heard the term "Steampunk," it is a literary genre loosely based on 19th century style science fiction, similar to the work of Jules Verne.
The literary genre was born about the mid 1950s and popularised by Disney with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and by the 1980s it was well cemented in science fiction circles. In 1987, the Author KW Jetter coined the term "Steampunk" as a tongue-in-cheek" moniker for the genre. Then Later, during the 1990s, people from the Goth movement, who liked to dress in Victorian style clothing, began to migrate and "dress the part" of the retrofuturist neo-victorian.
During the early 1990s, the Maker movement got involved, and people began to build items that looked like sci-fi props in 19th Century style, and so was born the Steampunk movement as we know it today, and which is now a global phenomenon.
Why I'm here
Today I come to you looking for help to pay for the apartment/shop where I live, so that I may be able to continue making my art. Any amount, no matter how small can be of help. Strictly speaking what I seek is to be able to afford my rental costs so that I may not have to jump from one apartment to the next, always seeking third part venues to build my Steampunk paraphernalia.
Every time that I need a new room mate to share the costs of living, I run the risk of losing the place where I work, and thus my livelihood. In my latest living arrangement I'm very lucky to have a rent a large two-story 2 bedroom 3 bath apartment I share with a roommate, and I actually have the entire lower floor with a kitchen and a very large living room with a cement floor, which is ideal to have my workbench/desk. Staying in this apartment indefinitely would help me grow my business and share my art with all of you.
Background
I graduated with an Aerospace Engineering MS degree from the University of Texas at Austin, after living for 7 years in San Diego and actually being raised in Mexico City by my maternal grandparents in the 1970s and 80s.
Socially, I got my start in the Steampunk community by joining the Brassgoggles.co.uk forum in 2009. At the time I was unemployed (Aerospace Engineering and a family business lost in the 2008 real estate bust). But when professional employment became difficult to obtain, I realised that I also had skills as an artist, which I developed as a child in Mexico, and I decided to put those skills to good use in the style of my new passion, which was Steampunk art.
It didn't take long before I started frequenting arts and crafts sites like Etsy.com and I opened a shop. By 2010, I dabbled on the construction of Steampunk styled computers such as the Mare Leviathan and Timekeeper, but such computers were really expensive and did not sell very well, although most people really did love them.
Then I had realised that there was a market for hand-made wooden phone cases in the retrofuturistic style of Jules Verne and Wild-Wild West. In 2011, finally my idea paid off and in the summer of 2011, I started selling regularly on the Etsy site. This the iCog Dione was born (below). At that point I could pay my rent entirely from my activities as an artist and not depend on undependable part time jobs!
From then on, it was a roller-coaster as people began to recognise me and suddenly I was doing things like attending the release party of Jeff VanderMeer's "The Steampunk Bible ," which took place in Austin Texas (besides NY).
It was later that year, in October of 2011, that a public relations specialist from Sony America in San Diego, Ms. Reena Leone, saw my Steampunk madness in Etsy and she decided to spearhead a little project which I would later call eCog Mercury. I made a "one-off" prototype for a modified Sony VAIO laptop, whose sole purpose was to film a 6 minute video blog entry for the Official Sony Blog SGNL and then be used for promotion at trade shows and the like. I would finish it in November and fly to San Francisco in the care of Ms. Pam Torno of Revison3 TV to film the clip attached below:
Even though I retained all of the rights to the eCog Mercury project, the Sony VAIO F-Series laptop proved to be too expensive to really be marketable in any real numbers. Basically it encountered the same problem as the large computers I used to build at first.
Then I noticed that the Apple iPad was becoming quite popular, and I thought to myself 'John, why not make a Mercury-style case for the iPad?" And so the iCog Hades was born:
The iCog Hades is a real best seller, and is doing really well in international markets, like Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. But even if he items I sell are expensive, so are the materials I use to build them, easily going into the hundreds for one of the more expensive iPad cases I build.
Now, even though I have a relative name in the Steampunk world and I have a steady base of patrons, I am very much a stereotypical artist and don't really have lot of money to throw around. In fact, I don't even own a car.
All of what you see in my Etsy shop is basically built on my work bench on the ground level of my apartment, which is why it's absolutely critical that I keep this wonderful piece of anachronistic real-estate, with a workshop below the living quarters.
Please help me keep my living and working space! This guy below and his little brother and sister will all be really grateful!
And if you do decide to give me a hand, who knows? I may name you an honorary crew member during my expedition to the Arctic aboard the United States Airship Orca!
As always, I remain your humble servant,
John W. Dunn
AKA
Admiral J. "Wilhelm"
United States Airship Orca
Organizer
VictorianSteam Austin
Organizer
Austin, TX