The last time professional tinkerer Christopher Hackett was featured in a NY Times story, it was when an confetti gun he invented exploded in his face, an "ordeal ordeal that ultimately involved the emergency room, the Police Department’s bomb squad and 65 days on Rikers Island." Now, he's got our attention for his latest project, a book and television show about "how to survive the apocalypse, in style."
He proposes that people use "obtainium," Hackett's steampunk-ish euphamism for old junk, to defend themselves against the evils of a post-apocalyptic world, including invading zombies: “If civilization and supply chains collapse,” Hackett wrote in Make magazine “the anti-zombie fences will still get built.”
The Times, in its earnestness, revealed some interesting details about this only-in-Brooklyn creative type (enough that we'll excuse artful but grating turns of phrase like "reclaimed two-inch metal tubing" or "repurposed metal barrels"): his most recent work, aside from an installation piece for the Honey Space Gallery, is the Illuminator, a mobile "art van" for an OWS's "live-streamed art party at Zuccotti Park," dreamed up by an artist named Mark Read and Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry's. When he's not being commissioned to make mobile media protest vans, a regular Hackett project includes reverse engineering a metal device that will allow him, perhaps illegally, open a subway grate he feels drawn to. Awesome?!
Ultimately, Hackett is a gifted recycler of junk that's been elevated to an art form: having built a community around his Gowanus Canal-based (naturally) studio workshop and hodgepodge group of DIY builder enthusiasts known as the Madagascar Institute—a group who builds flamethrowers out of old musical instruments and sends a "350-pound opera singer" across the Gowanus Canal on a zipline—of which Hackett is simultaneously "fabricator in chief" and "first among equals. Essentially, among the great-than-you-realized world of artsy welders and big-projects-people-build-just-because, Hackett is the pied piper. So when the zombies come, it's pretty clear upon whose door we'll be knockin'.
