1000 and beyond!

[obseq]

Just noticed that we are now at 1007 registered members! Not as dramatic as noting *exactly* 1000 but its close enough :)


A huge thanks to Russ, the backbone of the forum, who keeps this place going for all of us to use every day. He works very hard to maintain the quality of the forum and the results are evident!

Welcome to all of the new members and thanks again, Russ!

[Stephen Casey]

Cheers indeed! Sometimes you get more out of something than you put into it. For me these forums have been such a case. I am more motivated on a daily basis due in no small part to the good people of these forums.

[RuBert]

Cheers indeed! Sometimes you get more out of something than you put into it. For me these forums have been such a case. I am more motivated on a daily basis due in no small part to the good people of these forums.

Absolutely I agree. For those that might of popped in less than a year ago, say around March 2003, you would of noticed I was then rather excited when we got up to about 50 in registered users - so I'm really pleased now with more than 1000. (By the way - it's not hard to register if you haven't, and we don't pester you or anything, we just want to hear from sculptors or those interested in sculpture around the world).

I should mention the Sculpture Community is associated with the ISC - a non-profit International Sculpture organization that produces Sculpture Magazine and works to promote the cause of Sculpture and Sculptors worldwide. I’m part of the Board of Directors, but really I’m a Sculptor, and Sculpture is my passion.

We utilize my own dedicated server and registered domain of www.sculpture.net and ISC's domain of www.sculpture.org to function together thus forging our own little virtual community and connecting sculptors from many countries.

I think we all get something out of this effort to connect and learn from our peers around the world. Together we learn from the problems and triumphs of others, and have the ability to shape our work and future as sculptors.

Russ RuBert

[Araich]

Cheers! I sat watching the screen at 999. I even went half way throught registering the user "1000th" as a joke. But then thought better of it.

Posting on a public forum can be an intimidating thing, with thoughts of your mumblings coming back to haunt you, or your errors being silently judged. But curiously it is almost the complete opposite.

Within these 1000 are some of the most generous and informed artists you are ever likely to meet. Friendships have formed here that have gone beyond the keyboard and sculpture is all the better for it.

For members that have never posted, just remember that you can always return and edit what you have written, and that community requires participation to succeed. 1000 members is a huge milestone - but what matters is our common spoken bond.

[fritchie]

Let me add both my congratulations to the Community overall for reaching this milestone, and to Russ RuBert who singlehandedly conceived of this endeavor and who runs it wholly with his own resources - computer base and overall programming knowledge and effort. Many thanks, Russ!

Let’s go on to 2000 members and beyond! Right now our membership spans mainly North America and Europe, but we have members in Australia and New Zealand (hi, Araich, principally, but others as well), South America, Asia and Africa. We span the world, truly. This is the way of the future! We all grow by participating. Keep posting!

[RuBert]

About 15 years ago, I was a certified software developer for the Amiga platform, my own product was called LanguageVision and was a custom language aid for the education system, used primarily by the Language Research Center in Atlanta. It was shown on Nova and included in multiple studies and science magazines as well as Newsweek and the NY Times.

The programing part of my life had developed from my early efforts at computer aided sculpture. At KCAI I had soldered together a small Z80 based computer to operate a sculpture, but this was before CPM, MS-DOS or the MAC, so all the programing to run the sculpture had to be entered by hand in an early form of basic.

That early experience at art school lead to a number of summer jobs and eventually the development of the full blown operating system that even used command calls to format disks, open gates, show locations. In fact the main lexigram driven language system was sound and video based and connected to events going on throughout the 40 or so acre compound.

After the death of the Amiga, I wished I had developed for a different platform - but MS-DOS was so bad at the time it wasn't possible. We did get some versions working on NEXT - but that didn't have much of a life either.

I've been happily out of the software field for many years now and focusing on my sculpture. But it was fun for me to use some of my leftover skills in Unix and Linux to originally develop this Sculpture Community.

Charles Fritchie has been helping the longest and made a great presentation about the community at the ISC Figuratively Speaking Conference. We are only where we are today due to his efforts, and the especially strong efforts of moderators Araich, Obseq, and also the efforts of the many great longtime members and contributors to our community.

A big thanks to all of you and lets carry this on to the next level of possibilities!

[fritchie]

Russ - I can't believe you were a software engineer for the Amiga! Does that ever bring back memories! Amiga was my first personal computer, because I had used “main frames” for about 15 or so years when it came out, and I considered all its predecessors toys. My university had spent about $40,000 a couple of years earlier buying the chemistry (mine) and physics departments the first non-mainframe on campus to share. I and a physics colleague used this machine after hours to create freeform graphics on its circa 17 inch cathode ray tube and photograph the results.

People in town were so excited by this first example of nonscientific graphics that we were invited to put up an ancillary display at the first ISC meeting held outside of Kansas shortly afterwards, about 1976, I think.

An art colleague and I started writing grant proposals to get a graphics computer system to teach computer graphics, and one of the public figures in California I called for advice told me to wait a few months and specify the Amiga - it was currently in development. We failed to get an outside grant, but the university put up its own money two years later for educational proposals, and we bought two Amigas, one for the art department, and one for joint physics - chemistry use in art. The art department system had a video camera and digitizer. (As you know, the Amiga was a real pace-setter - it was leagues ahead of both Apple and IBM, and it had both video input and video output.)

I bought my own Amiga several months after starting with these two, and I used it for several years, maybe as much as six, before getting a Macintosh as my second computer. The Mac I used just for typing. I had a video camera, the Amiga video digitizer, and extra memory with this first home system. I even bought a good Sony Betamax (the first home video recorder, remember!) to use its freeze frame and frame-by-frame stepping mode so I could digitize just the frame I wanted.

Amiga was programmed in Basic, but I had used detailed, specific machine languages earlier.

It’s a small world!

[Stephen Casey]

Russ I sent you a personal thanks shortly after joining, but the PM just gathered dust and was either never viewed or just liked hanging around my message section. No biggie.

I remember before I bought a 386 I was at a friend of a friends and this guy was an Amiga fanatic. I was letting it go in one ear and out the other until he showed me a Disney liscensed animation program. My jaw hit the floor, and untill this day I have not seen anything as intellegently layed out and with such a beautiful interface, transparent windows and all. I never owned an Amiga but I never forgot the lesson of thinking I knew so much when actually I was clueless. :D

I like memories like that. I keep a worthless pot metal Cupid lamp that I bought in a hurry for $40 that I assumed was brass, it reminds me to slow down.

[RuBert]

As you know, the Amiga was a real pace-setter - it was leagues ahead of both Apple and IBM, and it had both video input and video output.

I agree Charles - and there are still things that could be done easily on the Amiga that are hard on other systems. Most of the really good 3d software like Lightwave eventually was ported, but then you needed to buy it again for around $1600 plus a computer but without the previously included Video Toaster.

I still have three or four systems around just for archive, and I wish I'd patented some of the early work as now some of the concepts are used in many programs. But back then the idea of software patents was not generally done.

Anyway my focus has always been on making sculpture, so I have little interest in the pursuing ideas just for financial gain. But then, I've never cared about money that much. We can't make art to just get by - we all could probably live richer in different circumstances, but life without art and culture would not be a world I'm interested in.

[RuBert]

And Stephen - thanks for your nice note

This little haven is turning into a peer group that is greatly stoving my creative efforts. The depth of some of these threads quite frankly are greater than a years worth of conversation with my neighbors. Good people but not active artist. The daily banter of who did what, to who, is enough to drive me mad.

As for your flash enabled site. Wow! It blows me away. It looks (and sounds) like a highly skilled specialest put it togther. The sound over the icons defuse the all too often serious feelings of the viewer to hurry up and "get it" of the works

The Flash work is new to me and I've not it updated in awhile. But the program works a little like the old animation programs for the Amiga did, so I just kind of had some fun and tested a few ideas. I've been busy with real sculpture and our online community for the past several months and haven't messed with my personal web site or really taken the flash stuff any farther, but thanks again for your kind remarks.