Studio updates - the good and the bad

Hey everyone! so much going on! Updates below on fun things like an immersive exhibit in Germany, new jewelry designs, reward shipping, new sculpture and also updates on bad things like counterfeit puzzles and GPSR shipping woes.

We've entered the busy holiday season and are non-stop shipping orders out the door now (including on weekends). This is good because this year has generally been slow. Small businesses like us make a majority of their sales during December. All the radiolaria have shipped except those traveling internationally. Puzzles are shipping this week (I just have to design the box label today).

Origins exhibit in Germany

A series of larger Radiolaria sculptures we created will be featured in the immersive exhibit Origins which opens in January at Kunstkraftwerk in Leipzig, Germany.

"Origins-Life's Epic Journey" is a breath-taking immersive exploration of life’s incredible journey, spanning in 4 chapters -  from the birth of the universe to the emergence of complex organisms. Combining real-life visuals, immersive soundscapes, and special effects, "Origins" offers an absorbing 360-degree experience that will leave audiences in awe of the extraordinary story of our beginnings.

The visuals for the show were created by Markos Kay (aka mrkism), an incredible 3d artist and scientific visualizer whose work I've been following for at least 15 years! We go way back to the Flickr generative art scene and it's exciting to finally have our work shown together.

The prints for these works are being done by Formlabs in Berlin on their new large Form 4L printer which has a build volume of 353 x 196 x 350 mm (13.9 x 7.7 x 13.8 in). Figuring out how to print these big guys and transport them was headache so we're so grateful for their partnership and this!

https://www.origins-experience.com/

 Radiozoa Jewelry

We finally launched our Radiozoa jewelry collection. The best sellers have been the Orb Pendant and Orb Earrings in silver. I think we are going to manage to restock those again just before Christmas, fingers crossed! We still have a couple of pieces in stock of the other designs too!

New Sculpture commission

We have a new sculpture commission for a private home that we will start working on in January so prepare for lots of updates about that process. We're hoping to make something similar in scale to our Corollaria Gyroid which lives at the Albany, NY airport but apply our Hyphae growth algorithm to it in place of the cellular patterns. There are a few challenges with that....like it currently won't work at all on a surface like a gyroid and we aren't sure how the variable thickness of the branching pattern will impact the metal bending. So stay tuned!

3d-printed organ research

We've been on a hiatus with the 3d-printed organ research but it looks like we will resume working on that in the new year as well....and hopefully get paid!

Counterfeit Puzzles

Over on Instagram, I have a series of stories I posted about our ongoing problem with counterfeit puzzles. You can view those here. Many of our puzzle designs have been reproduced (seemingly from photos) and are being manufactured in China. These puzzles are sold on many websites including Temu and AliExpress and advertised on google ads when you search for Nervous System or our puzzles. Even worse they use my photographs of our puzzles to advertise their counterfeit ones so the products are indistinguishable to most customers. We haven't had much luck in having these fake products taken down. Some websites have a procedure for copyright complaints but others don't. Even if they are taken down, they pop back up again eventually. I'm open to advise about what to do about this.

Here's a screenshot of a Temu listing using all our photographs and a review on Temu showing what the customer actually received. This one is a particularly bad copy.

EU shipping woes - GPSR

It looks like we are going to be temporarily (I hope) disabling shipping from our website and etsy shops to the EU due to the due GPSR regulations that are going into effect on December 13th. I only just learned about these a couple of days ago due to a message Etsy sent to all their sellers. As part of new safety regulations, all products shipped to the EU now need to have contact info for a EU based representative who can provide safety information on the products. While I see that this is generally targeted at limiting unsafe products from the EU market (like Temu) it seems like once again it's just going to hurt small / micro businesses like us. I'm sure big companies like Temu have the money to hire a EU safety rep but I'm not sure we do. Anyways, I'll figure it out after the holiday rush is over.