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It stemmed from a trip he took to Amsterdam with Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), a Bay Area art group to which Sarriugarte belongs, to a “sort of a Burning Man kind of festival of artists,” he says, called Robo Dock. His devotion to the artistry of wacky art cars in his “spare time” did not actually begin with the creation of their first car (ahem, space ship)- the Alpha Fox.

He’s come a long way since then – he’s designed lighting for upscale restaurants like Oakland’s Camino, and is now working on his fourth line of lighting for Restoration Hardware. “Very early on I was doing lighting and indoor coffee tables, chairs and hubcap clocks, all metal, a little bit of wood here and there, and glass,” Sarriugarte says. He moved to California and started to restore furniture, made art pieces from found objects, and created his metal furniture company, Form & Reform, in 1987. Sarriugarte’s passion for blacksmithing developed during a 1970s shop class in Boise, Idaho, where he was born and raised.

They get together most Saturdays in Sarriugarte’s shop, and work on projects and restoration. The group is made up of two-dozen volunteers– engineers, artisans, film people, teachers from the industrial arts workshop The Crucible, and workers from Tesla Motors and Tesla Coil. Sarriugarte’s art group, The Empire of Dirt, created all these mobile creatures for Burning Man.

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Additionally, Sarriugarte says, “Both Kyrsten and I are totally enamored with the whole apocalyptic… you know, society has been wiped out, and going back to the city, visiting and finding a grocery store full of stuff.” Sarriugarte’s fascination with the sci-fi mechanical creatures of his 1960’s childhood, fused with Kyrsten’s childhood love of Disney’s Main Street Electrical Parade, inspire their creations. There’s the Electrobite, a joystick-controlled, ride-on pre-historic Trilobite fossil that glows blue from underneath the wheelchair-based Golden Zeppelini “flying machine ” and the pair of glowing 50 foot-long fire-breathing vehicles called Serpent Twins - Jormungand (Midgard) and Julunggul (Rainbow). ) There’s the Alpha Fox’s landing craft, The Zolander, which is a tow behind trailer created for Mate and Sarriugarte’s daughter Zolie. There’s the moon-landing-inspired SS Alpha Fox, which blows fireballs from its roof “blaster.” (“Really cheesy 1970s looking spaceship vehicle,” says Mate. The snail makes its home, when not attending events, in Sarriugarte’s West Oakland warehouse-along with a half dozen other spectacularly imaginative inventions. They tracked down a stripped-down Volkswagen on Craigslist and began constructing the giant snail they named The Golden Mean, from a mathematical rule they used in its creation. Then one day, Sarriugarte says, when “the economy was going to hell and I just didn’t have a lot to do, I woke up one morning and said, ‘We should build that car.’ ”

They tossed the idea around for two years from the time they first drew the snail in 2006. “She described it to me, and we sat and drew pictures on a napkin.” “Kyrsten woke up one morning and said she had a dream that we were driving around in this giant snail,” says blacksmith and self-proclaimed Oilpunk Jon Sarriugarte of his sound designer wife, Kyrsten Mate, who has worked on Oscar-winning films. Doolittle-ish, 12’6 foot high, 18 foot long, 3000 pound, glow-in-the-dark, fire-blowing, motorized, iron snail, was built atop the skeleton of a 1966 VW Bug.

Fire snail