hey everybody adam savage here with some mythbuster props that i'm going to cover here
these props traveled around the country as part of the mythbusters explosive exhibition for 10 years
um that exhibition is through and now these props are being auctioned off to benefit the
grant yamahara steam foundation information on the auction is in the comments below ah this is part
of many videos introducing you to pieces of the mythbusters collection um and today we're covering
art these are paintings that jamie and i did in the episode called painting with explosives and
these well jamie has two have two more over there we made eight i don't even know how many paintings
these paintings are part of an episode jamie and i did called painting with explosives and
they're some of my favorite artifacts to come out of mythbusters history but first
it's actually important to talk about how these are part of a continuum in art history
there's always been this drive to remove the artist from the equation automatic poetry uh
exquisite corpses the surrealists the dadaists everyone was interested at some point every
movement has been interested at some point with removing the artist from the equation and this
is not the first time explosives were used for painting but it's the first time jamie and i did
and we are also not the first mythbusters to do it carrie byron actually paints with explosives
okay that is one approach these are two others and i will walk you through them jamie
chose to contain the explosive i chose to set it free um in more point of fact jamie decided to
weld together this 3 000 pound steel sphere this is like the heaviest thing i've ever imagined
and it had explosives in the middle with ports to around the perimeter so that when you detonated
the explosives the thing itself wouldn't blow up the pressure would cause paint to spit out of all
of the ports and paint a bunch of paintings and here you go this is a painting in which
its entire formalism was dictated by the physical reaction of expanding chemical reactions yeah it's
okay so that's jamie he contained the explosion i decided to release the explosion so i had a a a a
consolidation of i think about a pound of c4 and around that c4 i hung dozens and dozens of bags of
acrylic paint of all sorts of different colors i wanted this rainbow effect on all the canvases and
when we first looked at the highs oh right and so what i had was explosives
paint and then around that a steel frame that held canvases so that it would hold on to them so that
when the explosion happened they didn't blow out and what i was looking for was like this rainbow
effect from the explosives and i did not get it i didn't get it on the canvases themselves because
you mix together a whole bunch of colors you get brown or in this case this very specific medium
medium green now that's not to say these are terrible honestly with some of the color
variants i feel like gerhard richter would be proud but i didn't get the rainbow effect
until i looked at the high speed shot and this is this is where it exceeded any expectation i
could have had because in the high speed shot i think we're shooting at 10 000 frames per second
and you get to see all of that paint vaporizing on its way to the canvas before it all mixes and
becomes this one color and it looks like the explosion looks like a 30-foot diameter clown
wig in the middle of the alameda county sheriff's bomb range i think jamie even told me it was one
of the most beautiful high-speed shots he'd ever seen uh and that should tell you something yeah so
i didn't get the rainbow effect i wanted on the canvases i did get them in the high-speed shot
now these paintings are going to be auctioned off in pairs and i love this so that if you get them
you'll get one out of savage painting one jamie heinemann painting and the adam savage paintings
will be signed here i'm just going to sign this one right now i don't know which direction is up
so i'm not going to worry about it i don't know if the jamie ones are signed i can no
longer forge a signature it's not cool anymore all right get yourself some art it benefits the
grant hamahara steam foundation and you've put some genuine mythbusters aesthetic in your house
even if it does smell a little bit like explosives thank you guys i'll see you next time you