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The browser-based artwork the “Anthropogenic Slot Machine” combines the concept of gambling with the alarming decline of wildlife and plant populations worldwide.

Our addiction to fossil fuels, deforestation, and destructive land use policies are endangering these precious species. When you spin the wheels of the Anthropogenic Slot Machine, the sounds you hear represent extinct or endangered animals.

If one of the three windows displays a carbon-polluting machine, the screen turns blood red, and you’ll hear the sounds of industry and polluting machines. However, if you land on all nature, you’ll hear the sounds of birds and pure nature untouched by carbon emissions.

Linking the addictive nature of gambling with the loss of wildlife and their habitats is fitting, as our excessive consumption of the earth’s resources continues with every press of the gas pedal.

According to the Living Planet Index by the World Wildlife Fund, wild animal populations have declined by almost 70% in the past 50 years. This assessment highlights the devastating impact on plants, animals, and insects, primarily caused by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels. The World Wildlife Fund studied more than 5,200 species for its Living Planet Report, and found that out of the nearly 32,000 populations analyzed, there was an average decline of 69% since 1970. Up to 2.5% of mammals, fish, reptiles, birds and amphibians have already gone extinct, the report says. Recent studies estimate about eight million species on Earth, of which at least 15,000 are threatened with extinction.

Current estimates are 150 to 200 billion tonnes of carbon is fixed in the forests of the Amazon, equivalent to 550 to 740 billion tonnes of CO2, or 10 to 15 times more than our annual greenhouse gas emissions. Lakes and oceans are also under assault as the WWF index found declines in freshwater species exceeded those in other habitats, with an 83% population fall. 

The tragic reality is that the oceans absorb the heat equivalent of seven Hiroshima nuclear explosions every second from all the fossil fuels humans are burning. A Kiloton is an explosive power equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT. Fifteen kilotons every second is the same as 1,296,000,000 kilotons each day.

The main drivers of wildlife loss on land are habitat degradation due to farming, developments, animal exploitation, and the introduction of invasive species. Pollution, climate change, and disease also play significant roles in these international declines as global warming stress animal and plant populations.

One primary cause was wasteful agricultural practices, which may collapse our global food chain. These practices are responsible for more than 80% of deforestation. Agricultural runoff and ocean overfishing are also driving a collapse of fishery stocks and populations in those delicate habitats. Increasing conservation & restoration efforts, while producing and consuming food more sustainably and decarbonizing human industry can help alleviate the dual crises of climate change, and biodiversity loss. 

Mr. Lambertini. of WWF says, “We need to stress that nature loss is not just a moral issue of our duty to protect the rest of the world. It is actually an issue of material value and security for humanity.”

The population losses were not equally spread throughout the planet, sighting Europe, for example, which saw an 18% decline in wildlife populations.

In Africa, things are direr as 70% of human livelihoods rely on natural systems for survival and food, and the report shows a 66% decline in wildlife populations between 1970 and 2022.

We have treated these plant, insect, and animal populations and the earth they depend on like a slot game. Regretfully this is a game where we all lose.

This artwork allows us to realize we are gambling on the future health of all these species, necessary biodiversity, and our species’ survival.

The original Mother Russia Meltdown by Charles Wince is the painting that inspired my work below. Charles’s extraordinary oil painting, created with a keen and critical eye, dissects the relentless noise of consumerism, the grip of oligarchs, and the exploitative nature of capitalism. As a self-taught artist, his work is both raw and deeply intentional, offering a sharp critique of the forces shaping modern society.

His masterwork has been in progress for many years, evolving as part of a broader collection of oil paintings on wood and canvas. This body of work interrogates the illusions of consumerist culture and exposes the hollow promises of economic systems built on exploitation and environmental destruction—an unflinching look at the cost of unchecked greed and power.

In response to Wince’s Mother Russia Meltdown, my work is a hand-drawn piece on paper, framed with laser-cut stainless steel. It engages in dialogue with his painting, echoing themes of collapse, conflict, and systemic failure, while also reflecting on the broader consequences of war, industry, and environmental ruin.

I am also deeply sorrowful for the more-than-human world—the trees, the animals, the pets left behind in the chaos, and the intricate, living systems that sustain us all. War does not just devastate human lives; it scars the land itself, poisoning rivers, stripping forests, and leaving behind a toxic legacy that lingers for generations.

Bombs do not distinguish between combatants and the fragile ecosystems they obliterate. Forests become battlefields, homes for countless species turned to ashes. Streams that once nurtured life run thick with pollution from fuel spills, chemical runoff, and unexploded ordnance. The very air becomes tainted with the smoke of destruction, affecting not just those who breathe it now but those who will inherit this wounded earth.

The animals caught in war—whether the pets abandoned in the rush to flee, the livestock left to starve, or the wild creatures whose habitats are reduced to rubble—suffer silently, their pain often overlooked. Their losses do not make headlines, yet they, too, are casualties of human violence.

And war’s reach does not end when the fighting stops. The land bears the scars for generations. Soil poisoned by depleted uranium, dioxins, and heavy metals remains toxic long after the last shots are fired. Fields once fertile are left barren, rivers lifeless. Communities are forced to reckon not only with their own grief but with the slow, insidious decay of the land they call home.

War is not just a human tragedy—it is an assault on life itself. And as long as we continue down this path of destruction, we risk severing the very connections that sustain us, forgetting that we, too, are part of this fragile web of existence

Mother Russia Meltdown 2 by Ken Rinaldo is a reflection on the universal suffering caused by war, extending its empathy not only to human victims but also to the unseen, often overlooked beings—those yet to be recognized, discovered, or acknowledged in the vast web of life. It mourns for all who endure the consequences of violence, whether visible or hidden, present or yet to come.

For me, this piece resonates deeply on a personal level. My father, along with my grandmother and aunt, once walked across France, fleeing the Nazi occupation of Paris. Their journey was one of survival, fear, and resilience—an experience that echoes through history and continues to be felt in the countless displaced lives of today’s conflicts.

His growth was stunted due to severe malnutrition, a direct consequence of wartime scarcity. Deprived of essential nourishment during his formative years, his body bore the marks of a childhood spent in hunger. Yet, even greater than the physical toll was the emotional weight he carried—growing up without his father, who was killed by a mortar blast when he was just seven years old. The war didn’t just take his father’s life; it shaped his entire existence, leaving behind an absence that could never be filled.

If not for the kindness of a Swiss family who took him in each summer and nourished him with proper meals, he may not have survived. Their generosity was a lifeline, offering him not only sustenance but a brief refuge from the hunger and hardship that defined his early years.

War and its wounds do not simply vanish when the last shots are fired. The pain, the trauma, and the loss ripple through generations, shaping lives long after the battles have ended. I feel an overwhelming sense of sorrow for the refugees forced to flee the senseless violence in Ukraine and Russia, leaving behind their homes, families, and histories in search of safety.

Charles Wince’s painting, though created long before the war in Ukraine, eerily foreshadows the present crisis. Originally reflecting on the collapse of the Soviet Union, its relevance today is striking—especially as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant remains under constant threat due to the Russian siege. What was once a prophetic vision of instability has now become an unsettling reality, with the specter of nuclear catastrophe looming over an already war-torn region.

Each student in the class at the University of North Carolina Wilmington was tasked with going out to the streets around the campus and collecting whatever refuse they could find and bringing it back to the forest green on the campus.

They were asked as they collected the trash to imagine a story of why the human discarded trash onto the street and what circumstances would induce anyone to litter the gorgeous natural surroundings of Wilmington. They were given various lengths of colored yarn and asked to tie the trash to the yarn, as Ken Rinaldo would then use a cordless drill to wrap and encase the trash into the Trash Cocoon.

While this collaborative piece was fun to make, it was simultaneously sad and curative. These students were not the litter bugs; however, as with all plastic and waste refuse, they were forced to take responsibility for someone else’s careless behavior.

In doing so, they became better citizens preventing the refuse from being washed into rivers and out to the ocean only to return to our bodies as microplastics in fish and other seafood.

One of the students found a discarded coconut, which we placed on the end of the threaded rod. It somehow seemed to put a human head on all this trash and identified it as a mainly anthropogenic problem.

Below are students delivering their stories to Ken Rinaldo and another student holding up the bobbin as it was getting so heavy.

Special thanks to Professor Gene Felice and the Department of Art Chair Professor Aaron Wilcox for making this visit, event, exhibition, and prosocial remediating collaborative performance possible.

Exhibitions

The University of North Carolina Wilmington Wilmington, North Carolina, 2021
Trash Cocoon is a crowd-sourced intervention by Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs invited by Professor Gene Felice and the Department of Art.

The film and artwork urge us to imagine how urban signs could more effectively communicate the interconnectedness of technology, climate change, rising sea levels, and natural disasters. These issues are intricately linked, yet rarely highlighted in the signage that fills our cities.

“SIGNS” pushes the boundaries of informational spaces, advocating for signs that promote social justice, question the pervasive collection and sale of our personal data, and alert us to the potential infringement of our rights through everyday consumer choices. The film and artwork invite us to envision signage that prompts deeper reflection on societal issues and the pervasive impacts of modern technologies.

With their potential for immediate and impactful communication, signs can reconnect us to an ancient, pictographic understanding, transcending language barriers to convey universal messages. Drawing on Eduardo Kohn’s insights in “How Forests Think,” the film posits that signs are not mere passive indicators but active prompts for present action, hinting at future consequences.

“SIGNS” invites viewers to scrutinize the messages missing from our daily landscape and question whether the signs around us genuinely serve the public good by warning us of unseen yet impending dangers. It’s a call to rethink the role of signage in our urban spaces and demand more from the information we encounter daily.

SIGNS ARE INTERPRETATIONS THAT TRY TO JUSTIFY THEMSELVES AND NOT THE REVERSE.

• Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.

We often hear, “Driving is a privilege, not a right.” Breaking the rules and ignoring signs can lead to costly tickets, jail terms, and even death. There are immediate dangers, like entering a rail crossing when a train is coming, and long-term risks, such as those posed by smoking, which takes the lives of half of all smokers.

What about signs that warn us of inevitable doom because of car usage and polluting carbon output? What about signs that think more systemically, examining the relationships between global warming, sea level rise, and hurricanes? What about signs that express solidarity, seek social justice, and warn of the potential infringement of our rights through everyday products and facilities?

This begs the question: What signs are we not seeing? Do signs in particular contexts serve the public good by highlighting real future dangers that are not immediately apparent?

These are the signs that warn of less visible present and future threats. While scientists are certain that CO2 leads to global warming and increases hurricanes, signage can make this more apparent with graphics illustrating the dangers. Greenhouse gases, emitted from the tailpipes of cars and trucks, act like a toxic, dirty blanket around Earth, trapping energy in the atmosphere and causing it to warm. More heat means more dangerous hurricanes and tornadoes.

Consider this: oceans absorb the heat equivalent of seven Hiroshima nuclear explosions every second. Signs can communicate this alarming fact alongside more familiar road signs.

Signs are ubiquitous, found on roads, in churches, and in stores, each with design characteristics that give them authority, especially within urban zones. They are part of information and knowledge management, aligning with epistemology and equating the right to post a sign with authority. We are aware of these dangers, though sometimes we are not. 

This is especially apparent with surveillance technologies, which often yield poor results that disproportionately impact BIPOC people. Shouldn’t we have signs warning the public of the dangers of algorithms used to label individuals as more criminal or suspect based on biased data sets? 

Phrenology, which used the shape of one’s head to predict criminality, has been discredited, yet we continue down similar paths with biased AI.

Commercial signage fills our cultural landscapes, influencing social beliefs while invoking state-based authority.

Regretfully tech companies have promised governments that artificial intelligence (AI) can identify criminal behavior. Even schools have gotten into looking at children’s faces and sanctioning them for not paying attention by looking at eye gaze if a child is daydreaming and climbing into imagination, then that must be promoted rather than focusing on standardized lessons.

It is clear now that artificial intelligence algorithms have biases built into them, given the data sets are often constructed with the biases built in. However, we continue to go down these roads, beckoning an earlier time when phrenology was thought to offer some way of understanding and predicting behavior based on nothing more than the bumps on and shape of one’s head.

In the new physical reality, the distinction between virtual and real is diminishing as our cars and roads save and sell our data. With “smart cars,” the line between transportation and computers is blurred.

Driving a car now means agreeing to terms of service that include data collection, updates, and sharing your data. Most cars collect vast amounts of data, including GPS location, speed, safety system status, and even voice data, often without explicit consent.

When we drive, simply using the car we are operating, creates a need to accept the terms of service. This means agreeing to live, downloaded updates, or share your data, whether you agree to these downloads or not.

For most cars, the event data recorder (EDR) data, the computer inside the car stores your GPS location, speed, airbag deployments, crash avoidance alerts, impact data, safety system status, braking and swerving/cornering events, seat belt settings, vehicle direction (heading), audio or video information such as information collected from camera images and sensor data and yes voice. The car can collect as much as 25 gigabytes of data per hour, know how much we weigh, and track how much weight we gain.

There are always terms of service online, and how can we even agree to data collected, aggregated, and sold by car companies?

Given cars and their data collection, let us not forget that Dave, the founder of Wendy’s, died at 69 after a long battle with liver cancer.

When you consume fatty or fried foods and pile on the salt, your liver is literally under attack. Let us not forget the poor cows or chickens that get sucked into our industrial food system. The combined total of chickens (19 billion), cows (1.5 billion), sheep (1 billion), and pigs (1 billion) living at any one time are three times higher than the number of people on the planet.

Fifty billion chickens are slaughtered for food yearly – a figure that excludes male chicks and unproductive hens killed in egg production. Nearly 1.5 billion pigs are killed to feed the growing appetite for pork, bacon, ham, and sausages – a number that has tripled in the last 50 years.

Half a billion sheep are taken to slaughter every year. The number of goats slaughtered overtook the number of cows eaten during the 1990s, although the figure for cattle excludes the dairy industry. The environmental cost of our growing appetite for meat is alarming, given the rainforest is now one of the prime locations cattle producers look to satisfy our insatiable desires for beef.

Agriculture is responsible for 10-12% of greenhouse gas emissions. We must also not forget that eating plants, insects, and any living thing are violent to that entity.

Perhaps other signs that have one consider the nature of eating meat or the pure act of eating and what a violent act can be may also help humans understand their complicity in those acts.

We may confront producing meat on factory farms or consuming monocultural potato crops in fries and eating at such restaurants through the intelligent placement of these signs near to where humans consume. Would you eat burgers daily if you knew that one tree was felled in the Brazilian Rainforest? 

Fonts and colors are essential to communicate things like a global warning, danger, or demarcating direction. Color permits the signs to stand out from their background and be more effective with the light reflected off of cars or bike headlamps, further giving them an illuminated power for high-contrast and high legibility.

Given all the pollution poured into our atmosphere each year by the car and truck industry, we also need to have a sign reminding us that the oceans, which absorb the most carbon on earth, produce the most oxygen.

Of course, we are sharing breath with the algae, and we are sharing breath with other humans and animals as well.

As we are driving, we are often also in a state of self-reflection, finding faces in clouds, and what better opportunity to find out what is on your mind than by taking a quick Rorschach Sign Test?

This makes me wonder when we will have drive-through psychiatrist meetings with drive-in hookups that sit on our windows. One could just recline their driver’s seat and have a drive-in movie-style speaker mounted to their window.

Still, before these become standard as drive-through convenience stores, we may just have to let our imaginations go while driving in the quietude of our vehicles.

We have speed traps, and what about mind traps that lead us down neural paths of thought we may not intend or feel comfortable traveling on?

Police can use breathalyzers and speed traps to identify and prove your crime. In the future, we may have portable MRI units to see where your blood is rushing. Let’s hope that is not coming to a TESLA car soon.

Today we have RORSCHACH SIGN TESTS to see what you are thinking – but will you tell us?

In this sign series, I use an alternative model that democratizes the production and exchange of information, with warnings to the public for the public good.

They take a medium controlled by city officials and subvert the use of signs into one that

supports education and our urban communities. This enables knowledge sharing and direct participation.

Then some signs warn of election meddling, and the whole host of new laws that may suppress all from voting.

Let us hope we do not return to that international nightmare. However, we must remember it is our “supreme court” and the misnomer of “citizens United”  where the court’s ruling freed corporations and unions to spend gobs of money on “electioneering communications” and to advocate for the election or defeat of candidates effectively drowning out individual and collective voices of citizens.

My goal with these artworks is to expose a policy, examine authority, and establish accessible technological opportunities that allow knowledge dissemination for the common good.

This helps inform ways and approaches to enable the social and community appropriation of knowledge and communication technologies for local information, production, discussion, and exchange.

When you enter a church, for example, that conjures the figure of MOTHER MARY and appeals to guilt to obey GOD, are you questioning if what you are being told is an immaculate conception or maybe more so an Immaculate Misdirection?

Should guilt be a part of a social strategy to control behavior?

IMMACULATE MISDIRECTION. By Ken Rinaldo

 

Churches have used the power of signs and iconic symbols most successfully. The spectacular architecture of ancient churches, stained glass windows with streaming light rays, and Jesus nailed to a cross to atone for our sins all speak volumes about signs.

Could signs and symbols be used on the exterior of churches to help the flock question more thoroughly, the nature of these “truths”?

We can also place signs in gallery contexts, and they can speak with the same authority we are used to seeing on roadsides. Of course, if you took the Rorschach test above, perhaps you were thinking of some things that had to do with the computer relationships you have been having?

Algorithms make fine friends for that dopamine rush we get with Facebook Likes. Though are we “ALONE TOGETHER,” as MIT technology and society specialist Sherry Turkle argues.

While there are mental influence signs and how they can help query and diagnose your thoughts in the privacy of our bikes or cars, there are also signs appropriate to the global circulation of human dust and breath. This is significant in the COVID-19 moment, and the global pandemic, where we are afraid to breathe, and everyone can be seen as a vector of the virus.

Re-contextualizing these into the gallery environment is also fun. They seem to carry the same authority of speaking words with the power of color, icons, and tightly reflective materials. And let us not forget that airplanes were one of the primary ways the Covid virus was spreading internationally.

What about cell phone use and children. I am forever annoyed to seeing humans ignoring their children and focused more on their cell phones.

We can also mix signs with other roadside paraphernalia. Warning cones also represent ways to speak loud and colorful messages. Combining things like dust mops (suggestive of bacteria) or natural human hair with the two signs below creates new associations.

It also tells us that we must surrender to the tiny microbes in our stomachs and skin to create the ultimate group-consciousness moment.

String theory and quantum electrodynamics surmise that there are eleven dimensions, though, in Newtonian space, we have three.
What a bummer if, while driving, one of those 3rd dimensions collapses. It could ruin your engine and your whole day.

 

 

And then some signs reference the play of language below.

All signs are 12 x 18 inches mounted on aluminum, with weather-resistant reflective vinyl.

All signs are 12 x 18 inches mounted on aluminum, with weather-resistant reflective vinyl.

Mounting holes are drilled into aluminum, though do not perforate the vinyl until you choose to hang them, with hardware supplied with each order.

Signs are available for $110. each, or two for $100. each or three at $90 each, as part of this unlimited edition. Shipping will be calculated and varies based on your location.

Shipping to CA is about $20. from Ohio. To calculate your shipping costs, please send me your address to kenrinaldoATgmail.com.

Hardware is available to hang signs at $2:50 for two.

 

Collections

CAMERON ART MUSEUM,   Wilmington, North Carolina Algae Sign

CULTURAL ARTS BUILDING GALLERY   Wilmington, North Carolina

They are available in larger sizes, and ask for a quote if interested.

Obey all local laws in posting your signs, please!

Ken Rinaldo Concept, words, location photos, and signs Layouts and Illustrator work

Emergent Systems:

Ken Rinaldo: Illustrator and photoshop production
Trademark Gunderson: Illustrator and photoshop production

McDonald’s is most skilled in using signs and symbols to sell its products. This makes them particularly effective at selling their goods, but have we questioned the impact on our bodies and the collective global body?A good deal of beef consumers may not be aware of the extent of global warming, degradation, and killing of the rainforests by just eating that burger and fries.

 

Additional Exhibitions

SP/N GALLERY                                                                                                                               Dallas, Texas, Feb 7-Apr 25, 2026
Organic Worlds: Symbiogenesis in Art presents the World wide premiere of Symbiogenesis, and Anicca Antennae-Soil as Brain; robotic beings, as avatars to insects, soil and bacteria as well as The Evolution of Information = Life, and You are AS much Bacteria as Human cells SIGN invited by Professor Dr Charissa Terranova. 

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS                                                                                                 Columbus, Ohio. April 19, 2025
SIGNS as part of the Ohio Shorts Film Festival by Wexner Center 6:00 PM in film video theater.

ART IN ODD PLACES                                                                                                                       New York, NY, Oct 18-20, 2024
CARE 14th street Festival showing select SIGNS and New York premiere of the film SIGNS invited by curators Patricia Miranda & Christopher Kaczmarek. Founded by Ed Woodham.

CLIMATE FILM FESTIVAL                                                                                                               New York, NY, Oct 18-20, 2024
The New York Premiere of SIGNS curated and organized by Alex Turnbull

THE TELLURIDE  INSTITUTE                                                                                           Telluride Colorado, July 26-Aug 2, 2024
The Nature of Information: Exploring the nature of difference that makes a difference. World wide premiere of the film SIGNS invited by Richard Lowenberg

CAMERON ART MUSEUM,   Wilmington, North Carolina, Jan 27-May 2022
Confluence Exhibition curated by the Algae Society and Gene Felice invites the work SIGNS, including a worldwide premiere of a sign on Algae and the work Diatomaceous.

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, Wilmington, N Carolina, Feb 2022.
Exhibition and visiting artist presentation of  SIGN works. Invited by Professor Gene Felice

CULTURAL ARTS BUILDING GALLERY   Wilmington, North Carolina, Jan 30- 2022
Protest Signs: Projected Voices in the Community curated by Dr. Travis Williams. The exhibition invited by Gene Felice, the SIGNs works, Racial Bias Algorithm Ahead, We are As Much Bacteria as Human Cells, Are you an Individual? Global Warming Ahead, You Breathed at Least One Molecule + Visiting artist presentation Invited by Professor Gene Felice.

On the image is a clock dial connected to a stepper motor. As long as the global warming index increases, the clock’s dial spins erratically. The dial is connected to an Arduino networked to a Raspberry Pi microprocessor connected to the web and a live clock giving data about the current amount of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere. 

The 3D modeled cold fusion reactor is connected to a post-nature branch and stone, which electronics and data have now occupied. An LCD monitor with a global warming index (GWI) reads out on the LCD monitor connected to the world wide web with white storm clouds composited in real-time moving by on display.

The display sits in a puddle of oil & water within an oil pan, and a mirror at the bottom of the pan projects an overhead spotlight back to the installation’s walls.

The word frustration in the title is that solar, wind, geothermal, and wave power already provide real solutions to many of our energy needs. We continue to follow dreams of free energy independence and supremacy with carbon extractivist policies of fracking, coal mining, and oil refining that continue to pollute our environments.

Still, fusion does offer hope, and China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), also known as the Chinese Artificial Sun, sustained a nuclear fusion reaction for more than 17 minutes in Jan of 2022. The superheated plasma within the reactor reached 126 million degrees Fahrenheit, roughly five times hotter than the sun.

Cold fusion is one of the cleanest energy sources available because it can replicate the sun’s physics through merging atomic nuclei while generating high energy outputs for electricity generation.

Given that we do not yet have any of these technologies yet implemented, though we have workable solutions today, such as solar and wind, this work offers frustration and hope simultaneously. It is important to note that humans have worked for 70 years to achieve cold fusion.

We are still working on cold fusion, though we have not yet achieved it. In contrast, we have workable solutions today; the clock hand will continue to spin erratically, emblematic of the erratic weather the earth is experiencing. If the dial on this 3D print stops spinning erratically, it is a sign that global warming is not increasing.

Regretfully, the dial is constantly spinning as the number continues to increase, given our global addiction to carbon-based energy extraction and burning.

The dead branch also has lichen growing and continues to consume the energy supplied by the sun initially.

Exhibitions

CAFA MUSEUM                                                                                                         Beijing, China,  April 3-May 2023
Eco Vision Plan Exhibition invites the Maximum Frustration Compressor curators Jing Siyang and Dean Song Xiewei of CAFA Beijing.

THE URBAN ART SPACE                                                                                               Columbus, Ohio Oct-Nov 2019
Faculty of the Department of Art exhibition showing the 3D animation of the Continuous War Train, the worldwide premiere of the Maximum Frustration Compressor & Automatist human and machine drawings.

Materials

CNC cut frame, 3D print, Arduino microcontrollers, Stepper motor, Raspberry Pi processor connected to the web, rock and stick, oil pan, and mirror.

Ken Rinaldo; concept, construction electronics
TradeMark Gunderson Raspberry Pi interfacing to web
Ty Pavia illustrator cut files for CNC
Nate Gorgon CNC milling of the frame
Amy Youngs video capture

A woman’s tears contain chemical substances and when a man sniffs these tears they diminish testosterone by 13%, therefore, a woman’s tears possess chemical signals used to biologically manipulate men, which make tears an evolutionary strategy for survival.

Neurobiologist Noam Sobel at the Weizmann Institute of Science has peered into subjects’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging while only sniffing the tears.

When men sniff the tears, their breathing rates, skin temperature, and testosterone levels sank and as high levels of testosterone can be associated with increased possibilities for aggression this is a significant discovery and means of reducing violence.

While some animals use scents and sprays to communicate chemically, such as mice, which use proteins to signal, it was not formerly known that humans expressed chemically with their tears.

They have found that the region of the brain that is generally active and lights up when an individual is aroused, such as the fusiform gyrus and hypothalamus, was diminished when men were exposed to the woman’s tears.

When thinking about this it became apparent to me that tears are an ancient biological weapon and they also represent an actual lesson for non-violent deflationary ways of thinking about conflict resolution and reducing aggression. They may strangely allow the creation of an actual gun of peace.

The woman’s tears machine gun may be the safest gun on the planet as all it can do, is a cry for lost loved ones lost to war and gun violence, though it can also impact the dialogue surrounding the use of guns to resolve a conflict.

There are many different kinds of tears. Crying and weeping tears increase lacrimation because of intense emotional stress, anger, happiness, suffering, mourning, or physical pain. Emotional tears are often accompanied by reddening of the face, convulsive breathing, and at times spasms of the upper body.

Tears brought about by emotion have a different chemical make-up than those for lubrication or cleaning. Emotional tears contain more protein-based hormones prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, and Leu-enkephalin (a natural painkiller) than basal or reflex tears.

The limbic system is involved in producing basic emotional drives, such as anger, fear, etc. The limbic system, specifically the hypothalamus, also has a degree of control over the autonomic system. The parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system controls the lacrimal glands via the neurotransmitter acetylcholine through the nicotinic and muscarinic receptors.

When these receptors are activated, the lacrimal gland is stimulated to produce tears.

To complete this work, I will collect actual tears from a woman who has lost loved ones to gun violence. This work is fraught with challenges, as managing the real tears will be difficult and present much emotional pain to those who have lost loved ones to gun violence.

I also hope this work will allow a broader audience to dialogue about the use of guns and violence as a means of resolving conflict in both primordial and modern weapons.

For me, the work points to a primordial being, “human,” a layered animal with many ancient drives and communication abilities. The scent is an ancient activator of group action, sometimes surrounding fear or anger. Still, we understand that while anger and fear are great evolutionary strategies for group survival, they become more dangerous when powerful weapons are involved, especially with hair triggers.

Can we look beyond violence as a means of resolving conflict? I think we can recognize violence as an ancient and outmoded human drive that does not create solutions, though it does sew anger and vengeful thinking.

It is interesting that human sweat is also a primordial communications device and suggests that information in people’s sweat helped ancient humans better understand their surroundings.

In our modern world, where we mask and cover up sweating by adding perfumes etc., we often hide our natural smells and, perhaps, mask actual emotional states.

Is the same true of human tears?

A British physician BA McSwiney was focused on the chemical composition of human perspiration. Psychologists and psychiatrists from the State University of New York extracted sweat from the t­shirts of 64 donors. Part of the research was that half of the donors jumped out of an airplane for the first time, while the other half exercised hard. People who sniffed the sweat of scared skydivers became aroused in response to angry faces and neutral and ambiguous ones. Psychologists refer to it as vigilance.

Another experiment conducted by German psychologists and neuroscientists found that sweat from anxious men (who participated in a high ropes course) caused women to make riskier decisions – after spending more time deliberating on their choices – in a computer game designed to assess risk­taking behaviors.”

This work resides at http://www.darpa.us, the defensive artist’s research project agency, and will feature this work and artists working for peace.

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

REVOLTELLA MUSEUM   Trieste, Italy, Sept 2016
Art / Science / Technology / The Robotics video presentation of my works Woman’s Tears Machne Gun, invited by Maria Campitelli

MUSEU NACIONAL DE HISTORIA, Lisbon Portugal November 2016
The New Arts Festival presents, The Woman’s Tears Machine Gun video and premiere print of Gun on paper invited by Antonio Cerveira Pinto

GALLERY 152, Hopkins Hall, The Ohio State University                                                         Columbus, Ohio, 2016
US premiere of The Woman’s Tears Machine Gun

THE ABERDEEN PAVILION, Ottawa, Canada, November 6 & 7, 2015
Maker Faire, Ottawa, Canada, World Wide Premiere of the Woman’s Tears Machine Gun in the Happy Machine, invited and commissioned by Remco Volmer.

CREDITS

Design, concept, 3D modeling, and direction: Ken Rinaldo
Assistant: Trademark Gunderson
3D rapid prototyping v1: Alex Smith
Construction: Ken Rinaldo & Trademark Gunderson
Hardware: the Peristaltic pump is activated by rewired gun.
Raspberry Pi drives video loop.
Software: Trademark Gunderson

HARDWARE/TECHNIQUE

Software: Cinema 4D R15
Arduino microcontroller &  servo motors with pull string mechanics.
Prototypes were built on a Maker Bot II

Lessons on building and programming interactive robots.

BIO Requirements

Water or woman’s tears.

SHOW DIMENSIONS

This work can be displayed in a slightly darkened room or on the wall. It can also be hung in free space as in the animation above with the mount.

KEYWORDS

3D modeling, interactive, bio art, robots, non-violence