hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a show-and-tell that is about it's about 29 years
old uh back when i first moved to san francisco which is the summer of 1990 uh i showed up and i
wanted to be an artist i wanted to be a sculptor and i i was an artist and a sculptor and i did
a ton of art and i showed it in group shows all over the bay area in the early 90s the bay area
was a phenomenal city for smaller gallery shows there there was a lot of opportunity for young
artists to get their work shown um this was not the case in new york when i was living there uh in
new york in the 80s if you wanted to get your work shown by a small gallery sometimes you had to wait
um months or more than a year just to get an interview to have your slides looked at i think
one of the the entry level places i remember back then was called white columns and it was six or
eight months just to get an interview to look at your stuff um look cities like new york and la and
chicago hyper competitive places uh and so that follows that it can be difficult to get exposure
in a city like that and san francisco was less competitive there were a lot of small galleries
and they were all looking for people to put stuff in actually here's how hard it was to get my work
shown in new york in the 80s i actually opened my own gallery with 19 friends i think there
were 20 of us maybe it was only 10. i can't quite remember i think it might have been 10.
eight six anyway we opened up a cooperative gallery on first avenue and first street in
the old little ricky store uh in manhattan and ran it for a year it was called points of departure
that's how hard it is to get your work shown in new york we just opened our own gallery
but i moved to san francisco and there were a ton of small galleries nelson morales gallery
art attack gallery and i started getting my work shown a lot and i started submitting it
to other traveling shows the art critic for the bay guardian at the time harry roach was a fan
and an early uh promoter of my work uh and so i showed my work in a lot of different places and i
also showed a wide variety of work everything from fantastical weird guns to armor to uh what looked
like decrepit robot hands and one of the things i was particularly fascinated by was helmets
um and i was then as i am now still interested in the way helmets can change the way you see i like
putting on i like putting on vr goggles and looking at the pass-through i like the way in
which it alters the world and projects a picture of the world on the drawing of the world that
it's made and it turns out that i've always liked that uh and so i designed a helmet in i think 1992
based on this desire uh i have to grab one prop here to show you something what what what what why
isn't it there i thought i'd put this thing over there but i didn't all right i'm missing something
brazil i know it doesn't seem like a a regular leap to go from what i was just talking about to
the country brazil but it's not the movie is what i'm talking about terry gilliam's film
and in terry gilliam's film brazil there are a ton of fresnel lenses uh fresnel has a specific
type of lens i won't go into it right now it's got a cool origin story it's frenchman used in
lighthouses um but you could buy a small fresnel lenses and put them on the back of
your van and they would help you be able to see like a wide angle through your rear view mirror
and the exploratorium uh sold fresnel lenses like this one here this is a fresnel lens
and i bought one from the exploratorium and i mounted it into a helmet now this is yeah so
this is not the final product this is a great example of me the young engineer going way too far
right like okay so i welded this steel cage for my head and then i welded these side pieces and then
i welded an entire circle and put uh eight bolts all the way around the perimeter and lined them up
with the holes in this what a freaking nightmare that that is a lot of work to do i mean it's
it's pretty sure but it's also a lot easier if you just do it like this
this was design number two just a couple of clips and you could put in the fresnel lens
there you go and now there's two things that happen that are really cool when you put this on
one is that your head gets really small yeah my head's like the size of an orange here wait
i think it's even better if you do it like this there we go yeah okay so this is one cool thing
wow look at that if that's our thumbnail knows what is what what what is that
okay so this is the cool thing is that to the rest of the world your
head looks like it's the size of an orange right it's a very ah okay i i
hold on
just put that anywhere um the second cool thing is that i actually see better through this lens
without my glasses than with my glasses like it's the lens itself is almost my prescription
so on halloween the the the year that i built this i just wore this to a party and i went as like a
guy whose head had been shrunken but the really weird thing was after you wear this for like
a couple of hours and you're walking around the world the world starts to feel normal again like
you start to be able to make out what's going on whereas in the first time you wear this
i mean i think let me see if you guys can get a sense of what this feels like
yeah right it's like the whole world is a wide angle lens yeah it can be disconcerting at first
but two hours into a halloween party i was having a great time and there were no illegal
drugs involved whatsoever um so this i ended up calling it the distortion helmet uh and i put
it in a gallery show and uh and wrote a statement about it because yeah the transformational power
i was thinking about the transformational power of things that you can wear back then not realizing
that that same fascination would lead all the way to spacesuits and armor and cosplay
and the reality i am currently living within but this is one of the earliest incarnations of that
fascination my distortion helmet uh yeah i'm not sure where i can get these
specific lenses anymore but if i can find them or if you know where i can get them
and you can't even search for no lenses by their angle of refraction by by the type of like lens
action you can get out of it i mean i guess if you're talking to the factory you might but
certainly not any web page online um this is a really cool thing i wearing
it is a unique experience and looking at someone in it is a unique experience so
it's an object of still great fascination for me thank you guys for taking this little trip
down memory lane with me through the early 90s in san francisco i will see you guys next time
oh yeah there we go oh i'm getting a kind of amore oh yeah all right i think i can turn it off now
thanks for watching that video if you want to support us one of the best ways you can
do it is going to our merch store and purchasing one of our beautiful new
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from my sketchbook when i was actively building my bear costume for san diego comic-con a few years
ago what did i do with a bear costume at comic-con i dragged around the carcass of leo dicaprio
reversing things now this might be enough information for you to build your own bear
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