culture hacker

Hi there, Culture Hacker.  I’m really sorry I’ve been gone so long.  I have a good excuse – I mean, reason! – I swear!  I’ve been delving deep into a viral art community, using publicly available tools to create free toys on the Internet.

The source of my new found joy (obsession?) is Cubeecraft, one of the many sites that offer free papercraft patterns to download and build.  I’m not a very skilled paper crafter, but as soon as I saw that they were offering a paper toy of Purple Tentacle, I had to make it.   Hey, and there’s Max, and the dog from Duck Hunt!  It was immediately obvious that my free time would soon be consumed creating little free figurines of my favorite characters.

Then I discovered that Cubeecraft also offers a blank template for artists to make their own, which isn’t too unusual for papercraft sites.  In the blink of an eye, I had gone from building the toys to designing one, based on my friend John Kantz’s comics.  Then, I thought the one I designed looked lonely, so I might as well make a whole set.  The next thing I knew, I was designing a cubee of 011iver from Must Love Robots, and I had a whole list of characters to do next.  Also, I was at a Pilot station in Oklahoma.  And three days had passed.  What just happened?

Cubeecraft is massively viral.  For artists of any stripe, the opportunity to design something in 3-D and release it on an unsuspecting populace is too good to pass up.  The transition from creating cubees to designing them is also completely intuitive.  Designing a cubee is easy, and scales to artist skill.  It can be as minimalist or as detailed as the subject calls for.  The toys also go together without glue or tape, which seems to have a magical quality to it.

I am not the first artist to succumb to its siren song, either.  There are so many third-party cubeecraft patterns out there, I couldn’t even get a reliable count.  DeviantART, which plays host to most third party designers’ cubees, shows around 4,000 results for the terms “cubee” and “cubeecraft,” and the lineup of patterns is a blur of pop culture icons.  On one page I see everything from Hello Kitty, to Jareth the Goblin King, to Jamie Hyneman and a even an anthropomorphic iPod.

In the two days since I posted my set of toys, I’ve also seen people start working on their own variations of my project. One artist contacted me about building them out of metal; another is planning to build a giant cubee head that can be worn as a helmet.

The viral effect is no mere coincidence. Chris Beaumont, the creator of Cubeecraft and the artist who designed most of the over 200 toys on the main site, designed the entire phenomenon as distributed, community-based art installation.  In answer to the question, “Is Cubeecraft Art?” on the Cubeecraft.com FAQ, he explains:

Download-able and easy to assemble, the Cubees are an internationally shared project. Popular in Brazil, sold (without permission or commission) on the streets in Thailand, used in classrooms in Japan and in American Ikea displays, “Cubeecraft” appeals to a visceral need to build, and a cultural need to represent our ideas in abbreviated fashion.

Like any good viral artist, Beaumont has managed to turn his free, public art project into a personal source of income – he creates official cubees for commercial franchises like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Resident Evil, and Penny Arcade.

P.S. Did I mention there’s a Cubeecraft Ning for designers?  Of course there’s a Ning.  There’s always a Ning.