The Steampunk of Everything with Bruce Rosenbaum

Built in 1876 (a “Centennial” church) Bruce and Melanie’s home, workshop, and display space, started out as St. Mary’s, a Catholic Church, then it became an Episcopalian church, then a Universalist church. And now, since Bruce is Jewish, another name for it could be a Steampunk Synagogue, with Bruce as its Steampunk rabbi.

In the episode Bruce defines the Steampunk aesthetic as “a sort of re-imagination, as if during the Victorian period, or the industrial age, they had our modern technology. It’s this kind of retro-futuristic look.”

The art Bruce has filled this shrine to Steampunk with also provides numerous incredible illustrative examples, like Helioman: the 9’ tall 15’ wide DaVinci-inspired kinetic sculpture that hangs (and with propeller blades that spin) from the ceiling of the sanctuary in Bruce’s Steampunk synagogue.

Or there are his incredible “Humachines:” elaborate sculptures that depict iconic Steampunk authors and inventors as the machines they either wrote about or created. One example is “Sub-Human,” his homage to Jules Verne, the visionary author of 20,00 Leagues Under The Sea who is one of the founding fathers of Steampunk.

Bruce strategically uses Google Alerts to find potential clients, and then uses the platform HubSpot to solicit kindred souls and potential clients. In particular, Bruce is on the lookout for businesses that are doing adaptive reuse or redevelopment projects, such as taking an old mill and turning it into something else.

Once Google Alerts helps him locate these prospective parties, he uses HubSpot to send a sequence of six automated emails that go out over a six-month period. In each email he tells a little more about himself and how ModVic could add value to their project. HubSpot will also tell you when and how often people open one of your emails.

Bruce calls this “magic” because of how effective it’s been at getting responses, often by the first or second email. Or some people open the same email as many as twenty times. That gives you a pretty good indication that they’re interested! At any given time Bruce is in touch with hundreds of different people. Once they go from curious contacts to enthusiastic clients, he works with them to create specific artwork that tells their past, present, and future using objects that are often already there, on site.

Another way of describing the kind of collaborators Bruce seeks out are “Janusian” thinkers (after the Roman God, Janus, with two faces): those capable of opposite thinking or divergent thinking. Janusian thinking is an idea developed in the seventies by researcher Albert Rothenberg, who was looking at how great thinkers make their breakthroughs, and found they were not linear thinkers, moving in a straight line from point A to B when solving problems. Janusian thinkers often put the problem in the center and purposely come up with two opposite solutions at the same time, then figure out a way to fuse those two approaches together to arrive at the best solution.