Some Public Limits of Everyday Weirdness (2025)

A year ago, here on Medium, I resolved to do more repair work around the family house. If my results seemed rather “weird,” I decided not to fret about that; on the contrary, I rather enjoy probing the domestic “limits of everyday weirdness.”

https://medium.com/@bruces/the-homemade-limits-of-everyday-weirdness-0c7e6bb12abb

So for a year I tinkered around, experimenting and hoping to find some personal metier. After a year, I wouldn’t call myself a “Maker” or even a proper repairman, but it’s fair to say that I did find a hobby. My favorite craft materials are bamboo and steel wire. Bamboo is a planetary invasive weed, while steel wire is urban scrap. However, these throwaway qualities of wire and bamboo seem to actively attract me.

I will even go out of my way to buy-and-collect commercial, industrial objects manufactured from bamboo and wire. I enjoy the lightweight, ductile, mobile aesthetic of these materials; not only do I enjoy physically messing with them, I enjoy having bamboo/wire artifacts around me as my everyday, un-weird, domestic objects.

As I improved at domestic hacking, I found myself using the proper name “Laura Kampf” as a verb. Day by day, some everyday household object would break, wear-out, or malfunction (because they must, and they do). Then, “I’ll laurakampf it,” I would declare. Family members would tolerantly nod and shrug. A science-fiction novelist with a tool-set, fine, what’s the worst that could happen?

Laura Kampf was once a punk dropout with some design training and a fondness for power-saws. She became an accomplished machinist/designer/carpenter from Cologne in Germany. Laura Kampf is a well-known Maker celebrity, much like her colleagues Adam Savage and Simone Giertz.

Kampf, Savage and Giertz all make unusual things on video. However, Laura Kampf has a distinct laurakampfing schtick. To laurakampf is to make something useful out of junk. Laura Kampf relies heavily on salvaged materials: broken appliances, wrecked vehicles, and abandoned construction debris.

So to “laurakampf” is to deliberately repurpose these abject, abandoned, post-commoditized materials in some design-considerate, and even rather showy and eye-catching way. Laura Kampf takes some pains to show her public how she does these things, in the long-established popular-mechanics “how-to” tradition. However, she also makes some quite unusual, personal, unique and peculiar artifacts.

Some are quite weird. They’re not so abrasively weird as Alexander Calder’s “Calder Domestic Objects,” which I described at length in an essay a year ago. They’re distinctive because they’re from a different era with different means, motives and opportunities.

Laura Kampf is not a famous sculptor like Alexander Calder once was, but after ten years of this video Makertainment activity, Laura Kampf has Patreon fans, aides and employees. She has studios humming with hardware. She has a merchandise shop and a bicontinental lifestyle.

Also, Laura Kampf recently announced her intention to become an artist. She has encountered some of the everyday limits of “Making” and she wants to place some creative objects in art shows and in art galleries. This announced ambition did not surprise me. It makes sense that she would want to let her creations take center stage as her “artworks,” as opposed to her previous, standard practice of valorizing her YouTube video performance-art. This would seem to be a sensible career progression. Basically, it’s the domestic life of the artist Alexander Calder, but carried out in the modern day and in reverse. Rather than the artist becoming the furniture-maker, it’s the furniture-maker entering the art world.

We’ll have to tune-in-next-week to see how that venture works out, which is something I’ve been doing for years as Laura Kampf generates her weekly videos.

In the meantime, however, we should critically consider that remarkable laurakampfian practice of dismantling defunct things and grafting their components on to revived things. This is by no means a standardized practice in industrial design or personal handicraft. Instead, it’s a modern mutant-form of handicraft which cannibalizes industrial-designed materials and privately re-works them to create unique artifacts that look machine-manufactured, but are not. Instead, they’re one-of-a-kind assemblages. It’s punk pastiche and punk collage, using industrial debris. That activity is quite “weird.”

I myself do this in both theory and practice, but before I get all design-guru about it, I’ll point out that millions of people in the modern world already routinely live their daily lives with cast-off, repurposed, more-or-less industrial materials. They’re not considered “weird,” they merely live in their shacks or squats as a favela underclass. They make do in daily-life as best they can — although they don’t “laurakampf.” There’s a critical distinction to be made here, between the merely, starkly poor person and the refusenik bohemian. That’s a distinction as old as Henry Murger’s “La Boheme,” and there’s rather a lot of oxymoronic creative room to be found there. It’s as if Mimi from “La Boheme” had shown up from stage-left with a tool-belt, a 3DPrinter and a drill press.

Laurakampfing exists in some cloudy, as yet poorly-theorized interzone between Arte Povera, which is Italian avant-garde dropout art expressed with abject, non- “art” materials, and genuinely disadvantaged activities such as Indian jugaad. To practice Arte Povera is to call the art world’s attention to the overstuffed phoniness of the bourgeoisie. To practice “jugaad” is to repurpose a bicycle pedal as a door handle, because otherwise that door gets no handle. They’re both “povera,” but they’re not the same poverty.

Laura Kampf scavenges, but she’s never simple or thrifty about it. Laura Kampf is a technically advanced European-Union woman who is sometimes sponsored by tool companies. She rescues her materials from a planetary avalanche of first-world industrial debris — there’s nothing much for her to be “thrifty” or “simple” about, because that native junk of late-capitalism arrives in landslides. Sometimes the objects she repurposes are already quite weird when they arrive at her doorstep. Leftover German electronic-espionage cabinets have been a particular Laura Kampf favorite — NATO spyware, transformed into her tool-chests.

Laura Kampf will treat this objet-trouvee junk material with a tender designer’s concern. She will clean it, round and bevel its corners, remove all its splinters, and likely repaint it. This debris will be re-imagined and rebuilt with many dainty, user-friendly touchpoints. Then it’s no longer mere junk, because it becomes laurakampfian. Often her creations look quite 1960s European design-modernist. They look rather Achille Castiglioni, back when the Milanese design maestro was repurposing old tractor seats.

This process, performed in public for Laura Kampf’s horde of YouTube fans, has some strong “how done it” appeal. People watch Laura Kampf, not in order to learn to directly imitate Laura Kampf, but in order to be entertained by witnessing how she noisily chews her way through her own self-set problems. If she sometimes fails at her tasks, if she daringly risks mechanical injury or a nervous breakdown, that drama adds to the public appeal of her videos.

Laura Kampf junk is not formally “recycled,” because it is not mulched back to its raw materials and then re-manufactured in some new form. Instead, it is rehabilitated. Its defects, its apparent unfitness for conventional purpose, will be respected, recognized, and even publicly valorized. “Every Defect Deserves Respect;” this is a much-repeated Laura Kampf slogan.

There’s a distinct sentimental element of redemption here. It seems to be obscurely based in some moral conviction that a truly just society wouldn’t even have such a thing as “junk.” All materials are matter that’s made of materials, after all. So to classify and condemn some hapless object as “junk” might be construed as an act of oppression, like crassly declaring a wounded pet to be instrumentally useless.

Laura Kampf’s upcycled junk plays on people’s sentiments for the useless. When a laurakampfed artifact is completed, there will be many telltale details that highlight its recuperated character. Its transgressive, mutant-hodgepodge, ex-defective quality is an aspect of its appeal. A laurakampfed object that was completely, smoothly, and invisibly rehabilitated would be like Berlin techno without a drum-loop.

These defective elements are never introduced as mere eye-candy, as with steampunk decor, which often features glued-on clockwork cogs and maybe some fake “antiquing.” Instead, in authentic laurakampfing, those defects always need to be honestly inherent in the object as it was first scrounged.

To “respect the defect” is somewhat like an industrial designer’s choice to respect “the grain of the material.” However, it’s different, because it moralizes. It’s the manifestation of a punk resentment for the grain of the many cultural processes that transform products into junk. It’s an alternative countercultural act of counter-junking.

There’s even a distinct Gandhian element to it, like sitting in one’s loincloth with a private spinning wheel — not because one genuinely needs a home-spun loincloth, but in order to draw public attention to the imperial exploitations of domineering British industrial cotton-mill machinery. Gandhi with his DIY spinning wheel has no industrial business model. Gandhi is not some lone entrepreneur-industrialist who is somehow disrupting the supply chain and toppling his industrial fabric-industry competitors. Gandhi’s performing an intensely public protest intervention with his solo private spinning-wheel. Why? Because he’s the Mahatma, that’s why.

Laurakampfed objects are not static works of protest-art, meant for frames or vitrines (at least, not to-date). Instead, they generally perform some designed and more-or-less rational function. Commonly these functions are rather eccentric and farfetched, such as peculiar bike trailers or odd barbecue ovens. However, they’re not merely decorative. The practice of laurakampfing seems to acquire more cachet and moral seriousness as their functions become more genuine, heartfelt and broadly critical — such as Laura Kampf’s quixotic personal decision to rebuild an entire, tottering, ant-eaten old house.

This house, called “Haus Lise Lotte,” was, and is, a utopian experiment in domestic living. “Haus Lise Lotte” is a modern object lesson in “the homemade limits of everyday weirdness.” “Haus Lise Lotte” has violently collided with all kinds of interesting limits to weirdness, which are beyond the scope of this particular essay, but entertainly documented for three years by Laura Kampf and her camera-toting colleagues.

It’s become pretty clear that, although she can probably afford to “complete” the Haus Lise Lotte, Laura Kampf herself will never dwell in that utopian house. I’m quite all right with that; as a longtime Laura Kampf devotee-viewer, I even find it a psychic relief that she’s not going to violently reform that house on gesamtkunstwerk spoon-to-a-city principles and laurakampf every object and service that’s inside it. If that were to happen, then “Haus Lise Lotte” would likely be as alarming as a totalized Alexander Calder house where every possible thing was made from Calder’s bent-wire and tinplate. I’m all in favor of a woman pursuing a dream house, but it’s cruel when a woman becomes the captive of one. Every utopia needs an expiration date and an exit strategy.

Laurakampfing is a distinct form of modern design, and it’s quite weird, but it’s by no means entirely novel. It’s clearly related to many other activities that are more conventional and better-known, such as bricolage, kludging, Ikea-hacking, art restoration, industrial salvage and recycling, pre-fab construction, post-consumer alteration, and home-decor TV shows.

There is one aspect of it that does seem new, little-explored, and particularly unstable, however. Laurakampfing is not a merely private hobby. Laura Kampf performs on social media and is a social-media celebrity. She not only creates things publicly, but she also laurakampfs public objects in public spaces.

Her public-space laurakampfing even seems to be valorized over her domestic private-space laurakampfing.

Sometimes she creates useful junkwork that many hundreds of public strangers can use quite unknowingly. A guerrilla public park bench is a fine example — because it is public furniture, in a public space, created and installed by an activist.

To laurakampf for a YouTube camera is performance art and also a mode of earning a living. However, to laurakampf for the benefit of random public people who do not know you, and don’t even know that you’re laurakampfing, and have no idea of the source of their benefit — that seems to be the Mahatma-Laura fait accompli.

Clearly that activity is street-art of some peculiar kind, but it’s like graffiti with a power-drill. Domestic laurakampfing is rather weird, but public laurakampfing is extremely weird. Very few people will glide out at night and surreptitiously fix broken public infrastructure.

There’s a contemporary sensibility to it that somehow reminds me of the practice of “re-wilding.” Especially “urban re-wilding,” which is activity such as quietly encouraging the stricken vegetation that is struggling in an empty lot next door.

To re-wild an empty urban lot has many tragicomic aspects of hopeless love for a lost cause. Objectively, this act seems next-to-useless. Some weedy, trashy lot within a busy city will never become a fully-restored sylvan wilderness which has romantically “returned to nature.” This niche biome, such as it is, will be a modest pastiche mess of invasive weeds, unworthy of a dignified term such as “park” or “garden.” Instead, it’s more of a performative intervention that refutes the crushing logic of the city by allowing some space for defective otherness.

So why even do that? Why perform this liberated-trash-pile act of partial “re-wilding”? If you happen to water and fertilize an abandoned junkyard, what is the game plan and victory condition? Where is the exit strategy? It’s doable, even rather easy to do, but it’s certainly not a business. It’s not any kind of rewarded career. It’s scarcely even any coherent “protest.” At most, the upshot will be that living green stuff appears in a some desolate Rem Koolhaas junkspace which used to be dusty brown stuff.

If this made any sense, everybody would be doing it. They do not. Because it has everyday limits to public weirdness.

I want to be quite frank about the practice of committing punk assaults on the proprieties of industrial design. I happen to do some of this myself, and also I’m a cyberpunk who teaches in design school, but it’s problematic in a host of consequential ways. The principles of sound industrial design exist for some good and sensible reasons. If you create a functional artifact out of salvaged pieces of semi-random debris, that object has never been safety-tested. It can be hazardous, radically undependable; even if you yourself understand its risks, innocent guests or family members might be harmed by it.

Also, it will be unique, and that limits the process. Because it’s made of heterogenous scrap, you can never manufacture another one that’s just the same. It is not a mass-market industrial artifact. It’s a one-off punk hack.

The laurakampfing enthusiast should be fully aware that cyanoacrylate “super-glue,” that modern-miracle super-material, is a form of plastic. It is not miraculous but just plastic, just like the large shoals of plastic in the Pacific Ocean are plastic. “Let Glue Dry” is a core Laura Kampf slogan. She’s a carpenter and she understands joinery, but her creative work is, and has to be, extremely dependent on glue. Modern adhesives are central to her efforts because she’s constantly clamping together junk-scraps which have no common material properties. That’s cheap, fast and easy to do, but these Frankenstein chunks do not work together with well-crafted elegance. They’re built with materials that must age and decay at different rates, materials that are differently-affected by everyday water, by everyday changes in temperature, and by everyday use-wear. These “everyday objects” can’t be solidly united, because these design-monsters are held together with thin films of plastic.

A one-off Laura Kampf AirBnB might be an intriguing place to visit. A Laura Kampf residency high-rise in downtown Cologne, comprehensively built top-to-bottom with Laura Kampf methodology, would be terrifying. The practice simply doesn’t scale. It is not a comprehensive reform-wave like architectural Modernism once was. Instead, it’s a Gandhian gesture.

However, like a lot of Gandhi’s passive-resistance gestures, it’s doable; indeed, even the lowest and humblest jugaad outcast might join that liberatory struggle, a political aspect of social organization which Mohandas Gandhi always understood very well. I have no grand Modernist claims for the virtues of doing this. It’s not a utopian scheme for living, and yet I do it. This practice does not save me money. It certainly doesn’t save time. It can’t even be said to save any materials, because it takes a rather lot of screws, glues and thoughtful determination to turn inappropriate chunks of abandoned debris into designerish, designer-looking artifacts you can more or less live with.

But I do it anyway. Now that it has a verbal niche in my writerly head, I’m pretty sure that, next year, I’m gonna do more, and with some larger ambition. There’s even a clear frontier available for carrying this out, because “the ruins of the unsustainable are the twenty-first century’s frontier.”

We’re heading for a future world where environmental damage is sometimes sudden and often huge in scale. While, at the same time, public infrastructure is neglected or deliberately abandoned. Clearly there’s some new social niche here for a punk anti-vandal, some kind of dashing street-guerrilla of anti-entropic repair. That’s a frontier.

Obviously it’s transgressive to semi-covertly repair the nice things that the stricken authorities can no longer manage to let us have. However, as victimless crimes go, that’s quite an interesting one. “The public limits of everyday weirdness,” of course they’re still limits, but they’re different limits with different means and motives, and sometimes that’s all the difference that one might need for activism.

This is my second yearly essay that concerns itself with some rather ill-defined, yet somehow pressing topics. These are two heterogenous essays which seem to weirdly switch topics, eras, people and approaches, but after a year of making things, I’ve come to understand that I make things in the much the same way that I write. As a creative writer, I like pastiche and I like found-materials; I like what’s “weird” and I always have, but the effectively-weird must exist within some grander awareness of the context of what is weird and what merely seems weird.

It is New Year’s Day as I conclude this essay, and if the coming year spares me (by no means a given, but hope is our duty), I rather suspect that I’ll write yet another one.