I hope you enjoyed the preview of The Rocket Stop audio system. The harsh marine environment and rain has taken it’s tool over the past year, but the upgrades went realyl well, and the Stop is looking much better now. The new audio system is working (as of now), but is not quite as loud as I’d like it to be. Here are some quick photos and video I shot while doing the upgrades:
The next time you make breakfast, pay attention to the exquisitely intricate choreography of opening cupboards and pouring the milk — notice how your limbs move in space, how effortlessly you use your weight and balance. The only reason your mind doesnt explode every morning from the sheer awesomeness of your balletic achievement is that everyone else in the world can do this as well.
With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?
Best rotate your owl video ever.
I think we can all agree this is pure internet awesome, but few will will find as much value in it as I do.
<via Art or Science>
I gota admit, I love that there is a Radioshack two minutes from my house, and I go there often for emergency electronics. But every time I’m there I just wish it was just a bit better. I know it will never be great, I know that, but it would not be hard for it to be just a bit better, and this is a step in the right direction. They even have some nifty projects you can do including an RFID door project.
It does not say they will be selling them at the stores (and the more I think about it the more I realize they probably won’t), but it’s a step in the right direction. And hopefully it will turn some people on to playing with microcontrollers.
Well, I finally got around to processing most of the photos and video of a great project I worked on over the summer. I created a portfolio page for it here, but since I never really blogged about this piece as I was building it I figured no one really knew anything about it so I’m writing this massive post with everything in it.
When Five Ton Crane was commissioned to build an art car version of The Nautilus, the classic submarine from 2000 Leagues Under The Sea, I knew there were going to apertures involved, I could have never guessed it would be this big. As we started talking about the project a few things started to become clear.
First, this was a great opportunity to wholly revise my original aperture designs to make them more durable and more precise. I’d learned a few nifty techniques since I built my first set of apertures in 2007. Second, not only were we going to use apertures in the windows, but we also wanted to incorporate a big one into the door, which we were estimating would need to be about 4′ in diameter. Third, since incorporating a huge aperture into the door was going to be a major challenge all the other elements if the door would need to be designed around it, so it only made sense that I would build the entire door. Fourth, I would need to add some new elements to the project to keep it interesting for myself so I decided that I’d not only custom machine the hinges, but I’d also motorise the aperture in the door, and use a RFID system to control the locking mechanism. Oh, and I’d need to build two of these doors, one for each side of the sub (only one aperture though).
The four small aperture windows went together easily, and as gorgeous and cool as they are, honestly, they are so deep in the shadow of the 4′ door aperture that they are hardly noticed.
I was really amazed at how well the 4′ aperture worked, in fact, this large one is mechanical smoother then the small ones. See each of the blades needs to overlap several other blades. If you image the blades being very thin and flexible then you can see that when they are all stacked up atop each-other the stack is very thin and there is not a lot of torsion on the blades. Now since these are made of brass, the material can only get so thin before it lacks the strength to be constantly twisted without deforming. Usually I use a brass in the 0.03″ range. This thickness works well when they are small but works even better when it’s large, because the important metric is not the material thickness but the ratio between the thickness and size of the blade. I also found a new much stronger method to attach the pins to the blades (this is the hardest part of the design).
The motorization of the large aperture was surprisingly easy. I used two small DC motors with spur gears and nice torque mounted on either side of the cam ring. I then welded chain around the cam ring turning it into a giant gear. It worked the first time I tried it. I controlled the two motors with an Arduino and a motor shield, two limit switches and a few lines of code. I then modified an old positioner and inserted a set of buttons, so that when you pull the handle of the positioner it trips the buttons and turns the motors.
The RFID was super easy. I got a D12 RFID reader, hooked it up to another Arduino, and used it to flip a 40A relay attached to a 30 lbs pull automotive solenoid. The solenoid was coupled to a super beefy industrial latch. The latch keeps the door closed until is sprung by the solenoid, when to door is closed it pushes the spring latch back into its locking position. Just like the trunk on your car. I love the result. The door is rock solid closed with no visible way to open it. Then you wave your fob by the reader and the door literally pops open. When you close the door there is solid, satisfying snap as it latches in place.
The hinges are one of my favorite parts. Not only did they come out really nicely but they are so smooth and stable, and add just enough friction to give opening the door some nice tactile feedback. I modeled them on old harpoon heads and went to great lengths to hide all the welds. I love when I catch people staring at them and wondering out loud how they are put together.
An interesting read on the relationship between science fiction and technological research and development by Paul Dourish
Read the whole paper here.
Reading research literature as in some ways “fictive” is not intended to denigrate or dismiss it; rather, we want to draw attention to the ways in which both science fiction and the research literature are founded upon acts of collective imagination, and that any imagination of a possible future is grounded in expectations, frustrations, and understandings of the present. One might go so far as to suggest that this is not simply a reading of scientific practice alongside popular culture, but rather a recognition that scientific practice cannot be entirely separated from the popular culture upon which it draws and to which it contributes.
…
So the distinction we might draw is not between research that involves social and cultural factors and research that does not, but rather between research that acknowledges these factors and research that suppresses, ignores, or denies them. Ironically, what we achieve through an engagement with science fiction is a series of reminders about scientific fact.
Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.
What if that person in the corner hadn’t been able to do a Google search? It might have required weeks of library research to uncover evidence that the idea wasn’t entirely new—and after a long and toilsome slog through many books, tracking down many references, some relevant, some not. When the precedent was finally unearthed, it might not have seemed like such a direct precedent after all. There might be reasons why it would be worth taking a second crack at the idea, perhaps hybridizing it with innovations from other fields.
This quote is from a great essay by Neil Stepheson published in the World Policy Journal.
There are tons of good thoughts to be had about many issues while reading this essay, but what really resonated me with is the quote above. I’m a voracious consumer of on-line information, and any time I have an idea I immediately google/wiki it and dive into all the links. While I love all the information and influence I get on-line I’m also constantly fighting the impulse to set aside a design/idea/concept because someone has “done it” already. I often have to tell myself out loud “It’s you execution that’s valuable/original/worthy not the design/idea/concept its self.”
When I saw this 5DOF robotic I fell in love with it, that was in the 80s when I was just a little kid. I aways wanted one. So the other day when I saw it collecting dust and longing for the days when it was cutting edge I knew I had to resurrect it. It’s really just controlled by 6 stepper motors so I stripped out all the electronics and hooked it up to two EasyDrivers under Arduino control and wrote a simple Processing program to interface with it. I only had two drivers sitting around but I’ve got more coming, so soon I’ll have full control of this 80s wonder. Not sure what I’m going to do with it yet. But I’m toying with the idea of having it play with a mouse … a real mouse.
You know at events like Maker Faire I’m constantly being interviewed and videoed, and then I totally forget about them. Well this afternoon during a quick lunch break I checked in on Make and while I’m scrolling along eating a chicken drum stick I suddenly relise that I’m looking at a video of myself. Yep, although it was months ago Make has just posted an interview the did with me about The Uira Engine. Thanks Make!
Below is scanned clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle featuring the RGR and The Rocket Stop.
Yeah, it was also posted on-line, but its still cool to see your work printed on real paper.
Hey look! The Simple Act of Making a Mark is featured on the official Arduino blog!
Sweet! We love the Ardunio!
The work of Pe Lang
(via Triangulation)
I’ve got some ideas for kinetic sculptures involving genetic algorithms. The specifics of of the sculptures are still in flux, and I’m waiting to see which ideas gel. In the meantime, however, I’ve started build a code base to begin to see what I can do with GA. Here is one of the first little Processing sketches I’ve done to get the basics working.
This is a continually evolving population of Lines. Each row is a member of the population called a Line. A Line is defined by a string of random numbers (0-1) that makes up its “DNA”. When the Line is born, its DNA is translated in chunks of two numbers, each two number chunk defines a single segment of that Line, and an Line is made of multiple segments. The two numbers determine the color and length of a segment. The DNA is read until the Line is complete at the edge of the screen. All the lines on the screen at a given moment represent the population.
Once the population is complete, each is evaluated for fitness, as defined by the controls on the bottom, and the most fit members of the population are mated and mutated to generate a new population.
The controls at the bottom allow the user to select for a lines color (purple or green) and segment length (long or short). The sliders allow you to adjust to population size and the mutation rate.
So, really not much interesting looking happens as you click the buttons. Select for short-segmented green Lines and you get them. But keep in mind that the changes that you are seeing are based on the probabilistic evolution of the population.
You can click here or the images below to run the program yourself. This GA code is based on the work of Daniel Shiffman
Check it … The Simple Act of Making a Mark was featured on the Creative Applications blog! If you are into contemporary digital art (aka new media), especially post-screen stuff you should be sure to check out CA often, they post tons of great projects.
Well it took more tinkering then I anticipated but I got the Android ADK board running. The main problem I had was getting the DemoKit Android app to build. Turns out I needed to use the Google API level 10, not the Android API level 10, as the build target. I’m certainly learning a bunch about Android programing and Eclipse with this thing. It may also be a good time to start using eclipse for Processing as well. I also want to see if I can build Processing apps that can talk directly to the ADK board. It should be possible, it’s all just Java. Hopefully someone will write a processing library that can deal with all the USB issues.
Now comes the fun part ……
Whew! Maker Faire. My favorite event of the year, but it is exhausting. So much stuff to see, so many awesome people (new and old) to chat with. It was so fantastic meeting so many of you that follow my work on the blog.
Thanks so much to all those who came and saw the Applied Kinetic Arts group. AKA got much love from Make this year with a two page spread in the program featuring my essay “Now go make something that moves.” We also held a panel discussion on kinetic art that was packed. We got a fantastic response from all the visitors and the editors of Make who awarded an Editors Choice award to: The Uira Engine, Colleen Paz’s Bug Jars, and the AKA group in general.
It was also great to show off my new drawing machine now officially named The Simple Act of Making a Mark. Sadly, its first big day out was plagued by computer issues from the laptop I borrowed for the show, so it was only working in fits. I’ll be posing more photos and video of it in the coming weeks but you can get a peek at it in the photos below.
As per regulation 185.begta{goc(1=;)} of the geekhackmakepunktistolgoist protocol I will be at Maker Faire this weekend.
I’ll be setting up The Uira Engine and my New! Experiments In Mechanical Drawing.
And I hope to see you there. Go here for official info.
I’ll be with the ever awesome Applied Kinetic Arts group, Featuring:
Jeremy Mayer,
Alan Rorie,
Christopher Palmer,
Jonathan Foote,
Mark Galt,
Benjamin Cowden,
Colleen Paz,
and Benjamin Carpenter.
And we will be part of a Panel Discussion on Kinetic Art.
Sunday
11AM
on the main stage in the Expo Hall
This morning I got a last minute email from Dale Dougherty at Make asking if I could quickly write something that personally introduces kinetic art and the Applied Kinetic Arts group for Maker Fire this year. It’s an honor to be asked and I had allot of fun reflecting kinetic art and my friends who make it. I hope you enjoy reading it:
Six years ago I had no idea I was a kinetic artist. In fact, I had no idea I was an artist or a maker at all. I was working on my Ph.D. in Neurobiology at Stanford, which basically involved running experiments for six hours and analyzing data for four hours, with some pizza tossed in between. My research was successful, interesting and challenging, but ultimately unsatisfying. There was no one moment, but I realized that to be satisfied with my work I needed to make things, to produce with my hands and shape materials. I realized I was a maker and an artist.
That was in 2005, the year of the first Maker Faire. While I missed that first gathering of makers, I did attend The Crucible’s Fire Arts Festival where I saw a whole world of amazing, largely machine based art. There was one group in particular that I was strongly drawn to, Kinetic Steam Works (KSW), self-described “steam dorks” who restore and hack steam engines. I stood in the crowd watching their machines spin, cam and crank with eccentric, mechanical life, and felt drawn. Soon, I was sharing workspace and working with KSW. KSW had a motto that rang true for me: “Our aim is to be, rather then to seem.” The engines that KSW worked with could not just seem like the moved, they need to actually move. Working with those steam dorks I realized I was interested in making moving machines, sculptures that would be rather then seem. I wanted to make Kinetic Art.
In its simplest realization kinetic art has moving parts. Kinetic sculptures are art objects that covert energy into action to communicate abstraction. I often think of making kinetic art as the process of making useless machines. And I mean that fondly. Kinetic art is an exploration of movement, mechanism, and mechanical process and logic. But, ultimately, the goal is artistic expression, not the solution to a specific problem. And it’s challenging work. Building even simple, reliable mechanisms is hard, ask a mechanical engineer, but to do it with added aesthetic constraints is even harder. Kinetic sculptures not only need to work a specific way, but they must look a specific way. The tensions in this “aesthetic engineering” engages, challenges and amuses both the artist and scientist working within me. And it also brings the work to life.
Movement easily conveys life, purpose, and agency. I consider all my kinetic sculptures living. They have all the messy disadvantages of living stuff: wearing, breaking, sticking, jamming, and burning out. And all the beauty of living stuff: flow, humor, grace, dynamics, balance, and timing. This living quality makes kinetic art inherently interactive and engaging in ways other arts are not. Nothing captures our attention like motion, and once captured, a kinetic sculpture will hold onto your senses and pull you deeper, raising questions along the way. What is the object? What does it do? Why and how does it move like this? Who made this object move this way?
Kinetic artists, that’s who. Soon after starting to build kinetic work I joined burgeoning group called Applied Kinetic Arts (AKA). Nemo Gould and Christopher “CTP” Palmer founded AKA to promote the (mostly) kinetic art of a growing group of friends and associates. Participation in AKA is always in motion, much like our art. Through AKA members can jointly promote their work on-line, though the AKA blog, and by participating in group shows. More importantly, we share resources and advice. The greatest benefit, though, is having a group of like-minded people to drink a beer and talk shop with.
And it’s this community aspect of AKA that I value most. To personally know both art and the artists is a priceless and ongoing education. Where else could I find someone like CTP, with whom I can have a conversation that moves seamlessly from the subtleties of TIG welding aluminum to those of RS-232. Or Nemo Gould, who takes camp sci-fi and silly robots so seriously, and has shown me how meticulous, crafted kinetic elements can breath life into junk. Ben Cowden’s work shows me how simple gearing and linkages, can capture and mechanically parse human whimsy, while Mark Galt’s clockwork figures allow me to see human motion though the precision of his engineers mind. Jeremy Mayer’s magnificent typewriter assemblages remind me of the creative power of constraint, focus and self imposed limitations. Jonathan Foote, a master geek’gineer, hacker and coder helps me see how to incorporate my digital skills into my hitherto analogue art. New member Ben Carpenter has just begun to incorporate kinetics with his amazing metal working abilities, has taught me more about making metal move then anyone, and who I now help learn creative coding.
Our AKA community is deeply connected with the Make community. As artists we value the actual making, the process, of our work, of laying our hands directly on materials. As a group we value functionality and fun, fostering community and sharing knowledge. We learn from the same how-tos and online tutorials as you, and focus on sharing our methods on our blogs and at events like Maker Faire. I think our work makes a unique contribution to Make culture. It encourages and inspires people not just to make, but also to make beautiful, funny, curious and expressive things. Making is most powerful when you make something with meaning, emotion and thought, something you fill with life. An on-line tutorial can teach you how to make a gear but only your own voice can teach you what only you can make with that gear. Now, go make something that moves.
Last night I had a great time lighting up The Uira Engine at DorkbotSF hosted at The Exploratorium. Here is a brief video that Dorkbot put together with some highlights from my talk and some great video of the engine in action. You can also check out some photos from the night here. Them Dorksbots are my people.
I just got back from NYC where I was participating in a great workshop organized by modeLab and lead by Marius Watz, focused on parametric design and generative art using Processing and MakerBots.
For those who mainly know me for my work in metal, high-voltage and kinetics it may seem surprising that I’m starting to incorporate digital tools into my practice. But really I’ve been using digital tools formt he very start, and almost all my work from The Triaparator to The Rocket Stop have involved a great deal of CAD and CNC work.
Now I’ve begun to take this trend a bit further. Before I was an artist I was a computation neurobiologist, and that work equipped me with a healthy skill set in programing and electronics. To he honest when I first left the lab I was reluctant to use these tools in my art, however, those days are over.
One of the many things underlying this change was my discovery of Processing and Arduino. These two amazing, open-source platforms provide powerful tools for artists and enable code and electronics to be used in an art and design prototyping without have a huge part of the works creation be focused on those two aspects of the project. These means if I want to make a work that has an element of robotics or programing in it I can do it (fairly) quickly, which allows me to focus on the rest of the work. And since I have a lot of these skills already I think they will really open up some great new directions for my work.
So, expect to see more code and electronics in some of my upcoming work.
For now enjoy these photos of some of the objects we created during the workshop. I focused on writing some code that allows me to manipulate simple spiral shapes as a way to get to understand how Procesing handles meshes. The first few photos show some of the objects I was able to print using this code. The later photos show some objects created by others.
It’s important to keep in mind that all these shapes are designed parametrically. This means that they were not drawn in the computer as was normally does in CAD, but these shapes are programmed explicitly and with interconnectivity between the variables that define them. Simply put, rather than draw the spirals on the screen I wrote the algorithm (the rule) that then drew the shape. More simply put, I did the math.
Shortly after I gave my talk at the Sonoma County Museum as part of the Mad Science show Mark Pauline, founder of Survival Research Labs gave his talk about founding SRL.
Mark and the SRL crew had their new Spine Robot installed as part of the show, and they did one of their famous street performances at the opening. I posted some video of the SRL portion of the opening when it happened, you can find that here.
I missed Mark’s talk because I had a bad flu and I never saw that video of it had been posted. Until today when I finally had some time to catch up on some of my feeds and I found the video posted on Suicide Bots.
So here is part 1 & 2 of Mark’s talk, the third can be found on the SRL site.
For those of you who are into the technical stuff, just jump right to the second video.
Here’s a video of part of my talk and performance at the Sonoma County Museum. The people who came asked really good questions and were really into it. We had a bunch of scientists and electrical engineers. I think they liked the lightning. There’s more video of other parts of the lecture to come. Not only is there great video of the Engine working, but I also explain how it works kinetically, as well as some of the physics behind the effect.
It worked! When you try new things on an experimental sculpture, you can’t always test them before the show, so you just have to just do it there and hope for the best. And it was amazing that it worked! I knew we had done our job right when we had a bunch of physicists and electrical engineers arguing over what would happen next. They were taking bets. In addition to giving my talk about art and science, Ruben Margolin also spoke. And these photos were taken by Sean Donnelly. And there’s plenty of video of the lecture and the performance to come.
I’ve started working on a new sculpture that is a bit of a departure from many of my past projects. It’s an interactive, recursive drawing machine. I’ll post more about the details as the piece comes to life, but the core of it is the drawing machine its self. I’ve made some great progress on the core mechatronics. I’ve got the first axis (the X-axis) of the machine fabricated and I’ve got the stepper motor under computer control. In this video you can see the first test of x-axis. A boring but important step to be sure that I’ve got the code, controller, motor and linear bearing all playing nicely together.
While we wish they’d drop the Y and return to using an I, we’re honored to be featured in the SyFy channel blog Idea Lab.
Any interview where I get to ponder the awesomeness of Batman’s machine shop is a good one.
I’ve clipped out all the great media they used (you can find all that on the various project pages) but pasted the text of the interview below.
Enjoy:
You’re a Stanford man, a smart fellow, a real scientist of sorts. Why do you choose to create things in the realm of the *almost* scientific? Why not become a regular lab coat guy instead?
Why did I decide to take all my scientific training and become an artist rather then a scientist? One part of it was looking for a new challenge. I realized that at the end of my life I’d probably be happier if I looked back at my life and saw a great breadth of experiences. This encouraged me to leave science because the longer you sped in science the more your world narrows and deepens. In art I saw the opposite.
Another reason I left the scientific for the Almost Scientific was so I could work more actively and creatively with the physical world. I got interested in science because I was really fascinated by understand how the physical world works. But in science you quickly leave the physical world behind for a world of abstraction. Sure, I ran physical experiments, but then I would spend many more hours, on my ass, in front of a computer, manipulating data.
I realized science started with the physical, concrete phenomena and then generates abstractions that communicate them. But what art is really about is starting with the abstractions and generating physical, specific phenomena capable of communicating them.
At the end of the day, it was more satisfying to start off with the abstraction I wanted to communicate, and to create something physical that was imbued with that idea. In my mind, this made me more an artist then a scientist.
Also, I never looked as good in a lab coat as I do in my dirty shop clothing.
How do “real” science and the imagination interrelate in your work?
Real science and imagination are interleaved in my work in various ways on different projects. For example on the Dihemispheric Chronoaether Agitator, which was commissioned to be a “steampunk time machine,” I approached the design from a scientific perspective, imagining it was a real scientific instrument that was really capable of traveling through time. Each part I created had a function related to how this device would work and what it was doing. So even though it was all made up, there was a rationale for why various parts were placed where. And even though nobody would ever know or ask about individual parts, in my mind they all had a logic to them that allowed me to view it as a scientific object.
Every time I showed it people would ask “Does it work?” And I would say, “Well yeah, of course, it’s a real time machine. It travels forward through time at exactly 1 SPS.” When people asked what an SPS was I say, “second per second.”
Further along in the scientifically informed direction is another work I did called The Neuron Chamber. It was much more rooted in science. I wanted to take my understanding of neurobiology, specifically the morphology of neurons and how they generate these voltage signals called action potentials to communicate, and create a sculpture that would communicate all this.
So on that piece, the science was informing my work a lot more directly. As an example, I wanted the look of neurons in the sculpture to be directly informed by science. I had been unsatisfied with the way neurobiology is represented sculpturally or graphically. Usually neurons are depicted as very smooth and sleek. But really they’re these gnarly, twisted, ugly, lumpy, bumpy things.
Further along the line of using science is the Uira Engine, which is in a lot of ways just as much a scientific experiment as it was a sculpture.There, I was collaborating directly with a scientist University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He does high-voltage research, and we started talking about this effect he was playing with called a dielectric barrier discharge, which is a way to draw lightning on the surface of an object, and I became really interested in this as a sculptural element.
I, using my science background, was able to work with him to create a system that would allow us to test some of the ideas we were talking about, to see, for example, the effects of a vacuum, to see what different effects materials had on it. But I did it in a way that allowed me to make a sculpture out of it.
So that one was a little more mad-science-y. It was taking this effect that wasn’t really fully understood and making a sculpture that would be beautiful and interesting but that would also serve as a platform for understanding this effect a little bit better.
The way that science and imagination interact in my work ebbs and flows, and that’s one of the things I like most about my work. It’s not strictly rooted in science or strictly in the world of pure imagination; it’s able to flow back and forth, and I’m able to include as much science or as little science as makes sense for the piece.
What’s the most important thing that science and the scientific method have brought to your life and work?
I think being trained as a scientist, is probably the most valuable thing I have.
A lot of people think what you learn as a scientist is a lot of facts and procedures. While you do learn a lot of facts and procedures, what you learn that’s more valuable is how to think about things scientifically, how to approach things scientifically, and how to design experiments that ask and answer the most important questions. So science has given me a set of tools for thinking about complex problems and thinking about situations that I use every day.
It’s also taught me how to complete large projects and tackle large questions, by break things down into components and figuring out what order to do things in.
Executing a scientific project from conceptualization, through experimental design, experimental execution, analysis, and publication, is a huge effort, and it takes a lot of work. And creating works of art is very similar in that there’s a conception phase, there’s a design phase, there’s a fabrication phase, and there’s a showing phase. Both are massive undertakings, and you have to persevere through the whole thing. Working in science has really shown me that even at those darkest hours when you think it’s not going to work, or it’s not working, or you think no one is going to care, or nobody does care, that you just push through, and ultimately your hard work will usually be rewarded.
Choose one scientifically enhanced superpower: invisibility, eternal life, or the ability to shoot lightning bolts out of your fingertips at will, or …?
As far as what superpowers I’d want goes, I think I’ve always wanted the powers that Forge (from the X-Men) had. He had this ability to look at mechanical devices, fully understand them and create new mechanical devices that he didn’t even understand. From the point of view of the type of art I produce, that would be really handy.
To be able to look at an ATM machine and instantly know how to rebuild it to be like a giant robotic panda that dispensed red slushy, and could fold my laundry. I think that would be handy.
You can’t go wrong with Magneto and the ability to control the electromagnetic spectrum. I’d make red look more green. I’ve always thought that the ability to control the electromagnetic spectrum pretty much makes you God. And there were so many things that I always imagined Magneto could do with his powers that he never really did. I’d be such a better Magneto, I’d probably be nicer too. And I love the purple consume.
Of course I’d settle for just being Batman. His ride is so much sweeter then mine. And I bet he’s got a bitching machine shop in the bat cave.
Thank’s to all who came to the opening of Mad Science at the Sonoma County Museum.
Below you’ll find photos of the show, a photo shoot and video I did of The Uira Engine installation, as well as a video that is part of the installation, made by Ben Carpenter, of me talking a bit about the piece, and finally a short video to give you a taste of the Survival Research Labs show.
The First mouse click creates an attractor point. Additional clicks create points
Key Commands:
“-” change the movement direction
“BACKSPACE” Stop Motion and create a new attractor point with mouse click
“n” clears all points and screen
“c” Redraws the background
Burning Man is gigantic and filled with all manner of fabulously gigantic stuff to point your extra wide eyeballs at.
You get there and feel overwhelmed by all the blinky lights and the UmmOmphUmmOmphUmmOmph of the massive flaming speakers. When you start asking around, you realize everyone is talking about the same two or three pieces.
You know, those extremely large pieces. They’re the ones you’ll find thousands of photos of, the ones you’ll see again somewhere, someday.
But what about the smaller pieces? I don’t think they get enough attention. So, here, in no meaningful order at all, are 7 great, smallish pieces you might have not gotten to see this year.
I had trouble finding photos of this one on the internet, and had to email David to get a good one. David has brought several of his sculptures to the playa over the years, but this one really caught my eye. This was a really well done, stylish, wind-powered, kinetic sculpture that entranced me for some time. Be sure to check out this video of Gizmo in action. Photo by David Boyer.
Bunnies aren’t new to the playa, but this one was so wicked and weird I kept telling everyone to be on the lookout for it. Each of the huge geodesic eyes had a round screen with some very choice images projected on them. Best use of hot pink fuzz this year. Photo by jonandesign
I love Kate Raudenbush’s work. I love everything about them. Future’s Past had several thing that resonated with me. I loved the highly detailed, faux-circuitry lit in green contrasting with the warmly lit symmetrical tree. Inside, a small alter with a mirror reflected a delicate, suspended metal mandala that hung from the ceiling. Photo by Hammon
It’s simple: a large metal glob whose surface is composed of several maps of cities layered atop each other. When lit from within and spun by a participant, the effect is hypnotic (and dizzying). Check out this video of the piece at night. Photo by Hunter Luisi
This large, day-glo green curve beckoned to me from across the playa for days before I finally got around to checking it out. First, there is not much color in most Burning Man art, and, boy, did this piece have some color. From a distance, the color and the shape worked really well. When I finally made it over to the piece, I was captivated. Davis had sculpted and lit a series of small domes out of playa around the huge caterpillar, visually weaving a story of strange insects that lived in the playa. Inside the large green guy was a well, sculpted from hundreds of small play brick. At the bottom, beneath the surface of the playa, was a sculpture of a miniature city that was wonderfully lit. You can see a photo of the city here. Say it with me here people, Zark! Photo by Eccentric Jeff
Does that O look familiar? The folks who brought MOM to the playa reused the lovely O to make the word Oink this year. I love the idea of sculpting giant words. I always wanted to sculpt the word Boom! in a comic book font. I met Laura pre-event and asked her about the font, but can’t remember what she said. I love the font. I hope they bring the N back another year. I really like that N. Phot by David M*
This is a nice photo, but it doesn’t do the work justice. A large, rotatable “exquisite corpse”-style display of several wonderful and strange paintings. I loved it as soon as I saw it. After I spent a few minutes trying to get all the paintings to line up at the same time, I figured out that it was impossible, and that made me love the piece even more. Photo by WayWard or Michael
This is a fantastic idea. I love the idea of my Exploratorium friends running around Black Rock talking to people about the science that is all around them. Everything from the chemistry of glow-stics to the physics of a white out. Check out their youtube channel for more.
Almost Scientific will be showing The Neuron Chamber and The Uira Engine at the Sonoma County Museum’s upcoming Mad Science show.
The show opens October 30th and runs until February 6th, 2011.
This is going to be an amazing event!
Almost Scientific will be doing a high voltage performance on opening night alongside the legendary Survival Research Labs.
The show also features Applied Kinetic Arts members Nemo Gould and Reuben Margolin, as well as Exploratorium alum Ned Kahn.
Here is the museum’s description:
Mad Science
October 30, 2010 – February 6, 2011
This exhibition explores creative projects inspired by the convergence of art and science. The term “Mad Science” is used to emphasize the edgy and experimental work by this group of Bay Area artists, who are scholars, scientists, and classically trained artists. Represented here is work by artists at varying stages in their careers: Mark Pauline, the founder and director of Survival Research Laboratories, Reuben Margolin and Ned Kahn, who both work internationally on large-scale architectural projects, Alan Rorie, a Stanford-trained neuro-physiologist (Almost Scientific), Nemo Gould, known for kinetic found-object sculpture, and Andrew Sofie, a recent Sonoma State University graduate. The works range from mechanical objects to videos, and from the apparently dangerous to the humorous. Look forward to a Survival Research Laboratories street performance on October 30 at the members’ opening of the exhibition.
We are doing some minor rearranging of the site over the next few weeks so if things look incomplete or missing, that’s the reason.
Thanks.
Now you can buy Almost Scientific creations, such as our wooden and paper rocket models, directly from the source by heading over to our new For Sale page.
You can find it directly as an option in the menu above. See it over there in the upper right. Go on, give it a click.
This is the main announcement for the rocket stop. There are other announcements that I’ll post soon, but this is the core one. If you hang around the Rocket Stop for about 10 minutes you should hear this one.
I wrote it in collaboration with Copylicious, the voice talent was provided by Naomi and Leslie Gruntiz, and the production and recordings were done by Andrew Jimenez. And the programming of all the hardware was done by Five Ton Crane Crew – Weeb, Drew, Colleen, CTP.
My favorite part of this recording is the mention of Larf Flu.
From Flickr users The Other Martin Taylor.
The Raygun Gothic Rocketship Rocket Stop — Showing on Pier 14 of the San Francisco Embarcadero for 14 months.
Here’s a quick shot of the base of the Rocket Stop which we just got assembled.
Recent Comments