congratulations : Benjamin Cowden’s site re-launch, new machines!

Last year’s Maker Faire was my introduction to the methodical, meditative whimsy of Benjamin Cowden‘s wonderful machines. His bizarre and beautiful hand-crank machines rely largely on worm gears, which I LOVE. Worm gears are sexy. When falling into a trance at Cowden's Maker Faire booth, I started shooting live video (with my Nokia N95, via Qik), and Cowden introduced himself, turning the video into an off-the-cuff interview and demo of a couple of his machines. Here's the video:

The really exciting news is that Benjamin Cowden just re-did and relaunched his website twenty seven gears, and it looks fabulous -- and he's got fresh video of his machines, like the Kissing Machine, (seen in the above video). Plus he's introducing a new fantastic, mad-scientist creation: his latest piece, A Small Force. Cowden emailed saying, "I will have images and better video of the latter soon, but for now there is a little clip my friend Nemo [Gould] took." Go look at his site and see all the fantastic new videos he's got on it! Yay!