Applied Kinetic Arts

I was excited, but not surprised, to learn recently that India predates China by many years for their mastery of iron work. I had always thought that the Iron age had begun further east around  700 or 800 BC.

As it turns out  large-scale iron artifacts have been found dating back to 1000 BC in central and southern India. This suggests that the smiths, in order to produce work of this magnitude, must have already been experimenting for some time previous to this date. It is even possible that they were working with advanced iron smelting techniques as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century BC.

After ten or so years of learning the physical techniques of blacksmithing, my interest in the history of iron working has really begun to grow.

I’ll be spending the next two months traveling in India to meet with and hopefully work with as many smiths as I can.

Check back to see posts as I travel from the East to the West Coast.

-Stay Tuned

As an artist interested in things like movement, energy,  and sound it is always inspiring to look at Rubin Margolin’s work.

No CAD, no CNC, mostly handmade, always captivating.

He is undeniably a master.

- Stay Tuned

One way to make a living as a professional artist is to apply for things such as grants, residencies and public commissions. This can be a very competitive and daunting process as you might imagine. There are, after all, seven billion people on the planet guaranteeing an overwhelming number of artists all vying for these opportunities.

Here are a few things that I have learned from the perpetual application process I have been engaged in for the last year:

1. You will be rejected far more times than you will be accepted. This should be obvious.

2. The longer the rejection letter the further you made it in their selection process. I have seen enough of these now to tell the difference between an obligatory blow-off statement from a committee that doesn’t care and one that was written with regret over having to cut you loose.  (See below for my latest rej letter. The writer seemed  sincere about my not making the final cut and encouraged me to apply for future opportunities at his organization.)

3. There are an infinite number of reasons (other that the content & quality of your proposal) why you will be rejected. These may or may not include political squabbling on the part of the selection committee,  demographic issues, or any other reason you can’t think of.

The bottom line is that in order to participate in this kind of opportunity mining  you just need to keep applying with a bulletproof attitude. Its a numbers game; The more times you apply, the more you increase you overall chances of getting something.

Good luck and

-Stay Tuned

Rejection letter from Eyebeam:

“Hello, 

My friend and collaborator Max Chen Built these quirky and awesome custom bikes for the upcoming ODC Dance Company’s – Dance Downtown production this March.

Max is known for embedding his dark sense of humor into his work. I am looking forward to seeing how that will come through in this show.

Read the article in the SF Gate about the bikes and the show!

-Stay Tuned

Last summer SFMOMA  sent an open call out to Bay Area game designers, experience designers and conceptual artists.  They asked for inventive but low-cost ideas for games SFMOMA’s visitors can play in the galleries and other public spaces of the museum.  They received, in the words of exhibition curator Erica Gangsei, “about 50 proposals from community members from a multitude of disciplines and with wide-ranging levels of experience. The proposals varied from the highly-technological to the determinedly-analog, from the absolutely-feasible to the absurdly-farfetched.”

My friend and collaborator Sudhu Twari and I proposed a game involving common words used in art discourse. We chose 12 words and assigned a bodily motion to each of them. Like in bingo, players can check off a box each time they see, hear or think of one of these words (and make the motion) while looking at the work in the museum. They can also check boxes if they see someone else make these movements.

Meredith Scheff did the illustration work.

Our proposal was chosen along with four others and will be on display in the Koret Visitor Education Center from Jan – Aug 2012.

-Stay Tuned

This video was featured today on Io9, one of my favorite blogs.

A few other videos of  similar events have been floating around the internet for a few months now. I saw the one shot in Canada first; It was posted by a friend and fellow conspiracy enthusiast. Apparently, others have been shot in New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden, Costa Rica and The U.S. mainland.

As an artist who uses sound as a conveyor of meaning, these videos are tantalizing to watch and think about. Are they:

* Natural phenomenon?

* Military tests?

* The sound made by the vacuum of space penetrating our ever thinning atmosphere?

* Extra terrestrial communication a’ la Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

This last one has my vote, even if it is the farthest fetched. I love the idea of sound as a universal language.

Got a better theory? Let me know!

-Stay Tuned

This video was featured today on Io9, one of my favorite blogs.

A few other videos of similar events have been floating around the internet for a few months now. I saw the one shot in Canada first; It was posted by a friend and fellow conspiracy enthusiast. Apparently, others have been shot in New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden, Costa Rica and The U.S. mainland.

As an artist who uses sound as a conveyor of meaning, these videos are tantalizing to watch and think about. Are they:

* Natural phenomenon?

* Military tests?

* The sound made by the vacuum of space penetrating our ever thinning atmosphere?

* Extra terrestrial communication a’ la Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

This last one has my vote, even if it is the farthest fetched. I love the idea of sound as a universal language.

Got a better theory? Let me know!

-Stay Tuned

Last summer SFMOMA  sent an open call out to Bay Area game designers, experience designers and conceptual artists.  They asked for inventive but low-cost ideas for games SFMOMA’s visitors can play in the galleries and other public spaces of the museum.  They received, in the words of exhibition curator Erica Gangsei, “about 50 proposals from community members from a multitude of disciplines and with wide-ranging levels of experience. The proposals varied from the highly-technological to the determinedly-analog, from the absolutely-feasible to the absurdly-farfetched.”

My friend and collaborator Sudhu Twari and I proposed a game involving common words used in art discourse. We chose 12 words and assigned a bodily motion to each of them. Like in bingo, players can check off a box each time they see, hear or think of one of these words (and make the motion) while looking at the work in the museum. They can also check boxes if they see someone else make these movements.

Our proposal was chosen along with 4 others and will be on display in the Koret Visitor Education Center from Jan – Aug 2012. Please stop in and check it out the next time you are visiting SFMOMA.

Special thanks to Meredith Scheff for the awesome illustrations.

-Stay Tuned

The Basement Gallery in Oakland has offered me my first solo show this coming July.

I am going to make some upgrades to this piece and maybe even collaborate with a composer and use a specific tuning system.

I am also thinking about the shape a performance might take.

Details:

Basement Gallery

1027 3rd Street, Oakland 94607

July-August 2012

-Stay Tuned

One of the reasons I like living in a city so much is because you never know when you might turn a corner and see something like this.

I made these because I got sick of the damage I was incurring to my hearing from using my headphones as protection in the shop.

Check out the process

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RGR will be on display at its Pier 14 location on the S.F. Embarcadero for one more year.

Last weekend we repaired, retouched, and repainted.

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There isn’t much in this world that bugs me more than inconsideration and waste. I can link these two things to most of the obstacles that we face as a species and if you (the reader) and I ever meet, I will be happy to talk it through at length over a beer.

Here is an article about a group in Colorado that works against both.

-Stay Tuned

Enjoy &
-Stay Tuned

I recently started a private commission for two architectural security grills. These will protect a set of rectangular windows that flank a fireplace in the client’s living room. Since the windows face out to a shallow passage on the side of the house with little visibility, the client requested that the grills be designed as an interior element.

The design process ebbed and flowed a bit beginning with plant-like forms and evolving into scroll patterns that we are both happy with. As luck would have it I found several scroll jigs in the back corner of the blacksmithing shop at the Crucible where I am building these.

I am about 1/4 through the process and hope to be ready to install by the the year’s end.

-Stay Tuned

The Bike Bridge – Part 1 from ONE ANT RED on Vimeo.

The Crucible and BRAF hosted a project last summer which paired a collection of 12 year old girls from all over Oakland with Micheal Christian, a local artist. They collaborated on the bike bridge, made almost entirely from bikes that were abandoned at burning man.

-Stay Tuned

Listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson and makes me want to relive my education and become a scientist.

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Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

So, I posted this video a few weeks ago and I have been thinking a lot about it since. The initial beauty of the visuals during the fly over of the I.S.S. kept me preoccupied for a few days but then I started to think more seriously about what I was seeing. As the station orbits the Earth you can see many cities lit up in the dark. The networks of light bulbs, cables, towers, relay stations and  power plants are linked at certain points and spread to cover a significant portion of the Earth. This creates the illusion of a circuit board and makes me think that we have laid a robotic layer over the surface of our planet.

When I think about the infrastructure involved in creating this, I can’t help but be awestruck by the quantities of materials needed for its construction. How many feet of wire stretches throughout this system? How many lbs of glass have been formed into the various bulbs? How many other systems depend on the shape of this? Most of all I think about the wattage required to light each individual bulb in this collective illumination. I think about adding all these numbers up and what that sum total might be. What does that number even look like? What are we consuming in order to produce this energy and at what cost does it come?

I am not suggesting that this is necessarily a bad situation; it is just a staggering experience for me to think about the blazing trail of human presence on the planet and the quantities of resources that it takes to enable us to live the lives that we do.

-Stay Tuned

The Nautilus submarine from Oakland North on Vimeo.

Oakland North published a nice article about the latest project from my collaborative group -  5 Ton Crane today.

Read it.

-Stay Tuned

My friend and collaborator Sudhu Twari reverse engineered a commercial version of an electronic bow (Ebow) for a commission in 2010. He and I bought parts in bulk and spent a few days prototyping these instruments in his basement. Several months later I decided to recycle the idea for my MFA installation. I refined the design and built 9 more, each including a different sized bass or guitar string that were tuned to vibrate at different harmonics. This was my first real attempt to use sound as an art medium.

These instruments are the second generation of the work we have done with vibrating strings and are comprised entirely from hand-fabricated parts (except the tuning machines). The whole project took about two months to complete.

The boards I used for these are reclaimed (actual) 2x4s that were salvaged from some local architectural renovation. They are old growth, douglas fir with very small and numerous rings of growth. I counted over 100 in several of them. I really enjoy knowing that the sounds being emitted from these strings are passing through the layers of the wood which, of course, represent the number of years the tree was alive. This adds layers of meaning to the sound that is resonating through, and being amplified by, the boards.

Turn your speakers up to really hear the different vibrations.

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

My general policy is to keep  political content separate from this site. This is a very important issue however and one that potentially effects every internet user regardless of political or social point of view.

Watch, and find out how you can get involved.

-Stay Tuned

The Nautilus Aperture Door from Almost Scientific on Vimeo.

Long time Backbone collaborator and fellow 5 Ton Crane member Alan Rorie of Almost Scientific  was featured today on the MAKE Blog for his contribution to the Nautilus.

Nice work Alan!

Read the post.

-Stay Tuned

Since 2007,  5 Ton Crane has been building large-scale, interactive art installations. Most of these projects have been led by Sean Orlando.

He recently spoke at Landor in San Francisco.

Here is a cool video that was shot as an accompanying piece for his talk.

-Stay Tuned

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

I think this is is so awesome.

Made by Hand is a short film series celebrating the people who make things by hand — sustainably, locally, and with a love for their craft. This is the second video in the series.

-Stay Tuned

The Crucible is a nonprofit industrial arts school in West Oakland. I get so wrapped up in the blacksmithing and kinetics classes that I teach there, that sometimes I forget that a wide range of other classes exists in several other areas.

Kier Logo is a senior studio manager at the Crucible and and a teacher in the new glass blowing department.

Check him out.

- Stay Tuned

My classmate and friend Shenny is exhibiting her work this week in the CAA (Ceramics annual of America) at Fort Mason in SF.

Shenny is a talented artist that makes thoughtful and, at times, humorous work about gender roles using new and re-claimed ceramics. Specifically, she uses old porcelain china that was made in a time where gender roles, and our society as a whole, was very different and arguably more difficult for women.

There is still an irritating rift between the worlds of Fine Arts and Crafts that Shenny maneuvers quite well. I can appreciate the obstacles one might face working in the space between these worlds.  My attempts to merge my background in blacksmithing with more conceptual art has not been without its share of challenges.

One way Shenny overcomes this is by subverting the function that the dinnerware was originally intended for. She then builds, combines, fuses and adds imagery to the china that negates and counteracts elements of the social culture which produced these objects.

But don’t take my word for it. Read the article and go see the show!

-Stay Tuned

I was interviewed this past summer at the Bay Area Maker Faire about the piece I had in the Applied Kinetic Arts exhibition.

I have been thinking about the new directions that my work is moving in and what I might build for next years Maker Faire. Think CNC Weeble Wobbles.

-Stay Tuned

The 5 Ton Crane Crew installed the rocket on the San Francisco Embarcadero pier last year with help from BRAF. Since then it has served as a backdrop to countless events, weddings, and as the article states, ” is art that sparks imagination and joy, the stuff of which vibrant cities are made of.”

Read the article here.

-Stay Tuned

What happens during the September equinox?

The sun crosses the celestial equator and moves southward in the northern hemisphere during the September equinox. The location on the earth where the sun is directly overhead at solar noon is known as the subsolar point. The subsolar point occurs on the equator during the September equinox and March equinox. At that time, the earth’s axis of rotation is perpendicular to the line connecting the centers of the earth and the sun. This is the time when many people believe that the earth experiences 12 hours of day and night. However, this is not exactly the case.

During the equinox, the length of night and day across the world is nearly, but not entirely, equal. This is because the day is slightly longer in places that are further away from the equator, and because the sun takes longer to rise and set in these locations. Furthermore, the sun takes longer to rise and set farther from the equator because it does not set straight down – it moves in a horizontal direction.

Moreover, there is an atmospheric refraction that causes the sun’s disk to appear higher in the sky than it would if earth had no atmosphere. timeanddate.com has a more detailed explanation on this topic. timeanddate.com has more information on why day and night are not exactly of equal length during the equinoxes.

For more mind-blowing, Earth movement information see here.

-Stay Tuned

What? you weren’t able to take a week and a half off from work and drop a grand in supplies and fuel to drive out to that thing in the desert?

Well that’s OK, because the Nautilus will be making another appearance this weekend in Santa Rosa, Ca. at the Great Handcar Regatta.

That’s right folks,  you can still  catch a glimpse of (Handcar veterans & champions) 5 Ton Crane’s latest collaborative project – The Nautilus.

The Great Handcar Regatta
SUNDAY, 25th of SEPTEMBER, 2011, 11AM-6PM
Railroad Square, Santa Rosa, CA,
in Depot Park between 4th / 5th Streets & Wilson Street

Word is there is even free valet bike parking.

Don’t forget to check out the top hatch – I built that.

-Stay Tuned

Barn Owl – Turiya from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.

Barn Owl is a heavy, minimalist, collaboration between guitarists Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti. I met these guys a couple of years back when I was in grad school studying sound and vibrations and have followed their progress since.

The new Barn Owl LP, titled Lost in the Glare features the additions of a Farfisa organ (Made popular by the Philip Glass Ensemble), Juno 60 synthesizer, bass clarinet, manipulated cassette tapes (also a minimalist trick) , tanpura, gong, and drums.

The track Turiya featured in the video, provides a potent dose of their sound that Aquarius Records elegantly describes as “darkly epic doom folk dronedrift dreaminess.”

Download the MP3 for free here, courtesy of Thrill Jockey records.

-Stay Tuned

Here is an article about Beatriz Cuevas, a long time intern at the indusrtial arts school that I teach at – the Crucible.

She was just accepted into Stanford and her admission letter sited her passion for industrial arts and her involvement with ther Crucible as a major deciding factor.

“After taking classes at The Crucible, I became better at understanding what objects were made of. I was able to see the medium used and the work that went into making something. I think that this transfers into understanding a topic in school and understanding why something is the way it is. I have learned to think critically,” Beatriz says.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Way to go Beatriz!

- Stay Tuned

Here is an awesome article from one of my favorite blogs – io9.

It addresses the role of public science and goes into the history of some of the very important contributions it has made to our civilization. The article also attempts to debunk some of the popular myths that are perpetuated by those wishing to cut its funding.

This article is part of Public Science Triumphs, an ongoing series that io9 will be running over the next few months in partnership with several other publications that cover the sciences.

-Stay Tuned

Ok ok, so I missed a couple months with my reviews, but com’on, I was busy moving my studio and building a hatch for this.

I would like to talk a little about Sheri Simons this month. She is a sculptor from Northern California who’s work, for me, is ultimately about the relationship between structure and movement. She seems to use these elements as a springboard to also touch on many other issues.

Here large-scale, kinetic installations are colossal and her smaller, older work has a playful sense. All of it seems to have a sense of snark embedded within its content. Her work also lends to the environment that it is in a sense of precariousness that sends me on several tangents of thought. Some of these include the conflict between industry, human productivity and the political bureaucracy that often stand in their way. Cultural expectations, roles and gender issues also seem to percolate through some of her pieces.

I met her last year at a workshop taught by Trimpin. She was the coordinator for the event and was always a source of invaluable technical and aesthetic information.

She is currently on the sculpture faculty at Chico State University.

Here is an interesting article by Robert T. Gonzalez about some of the ways our eating habits are manipulated by the environments we eat in. Specifically, it refers to the actual shapes of our dinnerware and glasses and the optical illusions they create.

The most interesting thing about this for me was realizing how strong the link was between our visual  sense and the psychology behind our decision making process.

This video is featured in the article.

It was great to get the chance, once again, to be a part of the process that the collaborative group 5 Ton Crane engages in during the construction of their large projects.

My contribution to their current work (a scaled down and land-based version of the Nautilus) was the design and fabrication of the top hatch. This is the only passageway to and from the control deck.

I was able to use some of my forging skills to make the handles which I think adds texture to the narrative of the overall piece. I am hoping that since the passengers will have to touch the handles everyday, that the details won’t go unnoticed.

The handles on both sides of the hatch turn a spur gear which engages a set of racks. These travel outwards, overlapping the sub frame which locks the hatch.

It has been a busy summer and this project was a bit rushed for me. This caused many vexing fabrication problems. Nevertheless, after many hours of delirious installation and a small fire in the sub, the hatch is finally secured in place.

The crew will be putting the finishing touches on the boat in the next couple of days just in time to bring it out to the Black Rock Dessert for its maiden voyage. With luck they will encounter a giant squid at Burning Man that they can test the electric repulsion field on.

Nautilus Top Hatch from Benjamin Carpenter on Vimeo.

The 5 Ton Crane crew has been at it again this summer. For the past few months, they have been building a scaled down version of the Nautilus from Jules Verne’s 20,000 leagues under the sea. The sub won’t actually be sea-worthy and sadly won’t be ravaging any whaling ships or other enemies of the oceans any time soon. Nevertheless, it has an unexpected and pretty cool function. The sub was contracted to be a land-based art-car for the Burning Man Festival happening this Sept. in the Black Rock Desert.

The base of the sub was reclaimed from one of those boxy cars that push airplanes around. Most of the project was designed in Solid Works then laser cut and assembled over the base like a puzzle. The exterior skin was hand cut, formed and riveted to the curves of the hull, which lends a great deal of authenticity to the overall look of the piece.

My contribution to the project is the top hatch, which will be the primary access point to the deck. The file for a 34” steel disc was sent off this week. While I wait for that piece to be cut and delivered, I have been working on the hand-wheels that the owners will use to lock, un-lock and open the hatch.

I don’t often get the chance to make things as substantial as I would like, and so when the opportunity comes up Its really exciting.

I found some 1 1/8” solid round stock and bent it on a circle jig.

I just got around to editing the footage that was shot for my thesis installation back in May. I am submitting this piece again for a show with the theme “Time”.
Here is Population Flow, an interactive, sculptural, sound installation. It expresses the growth that our population undergoes in 24 hours.

Fopulation Flow from Benjamin Carpenter on Vimeo.

-Stay Tuned

Each year the Crucible hosts a youth summer camp offering a range of classes in the industrial arts. For the past two years I have participated as a teacher in the Kinetics and Blacksmithing departments.

My interest in this program is the opportunity it gives me to observe the kids form new relationships to the three-dimensional world we live in.

As our educations move further away from hands-on experiences, programs like this re-connect kids with notions of material awareness, energy consumption, use and re-reuse.

It has always been exciting for me to see the kids that come through the program leave with an invigorated sense of curiosity, zeal and a hand-full of new skills to manifest their creativity.

A crew from the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley school of journalism came by one day to shoot some video. They interviewed me and one of my students as well teachers from other classes.

Watch the videos about the other departments.

-Stay Tuned

Here is a short video that my friend Sean Donnelly made for Time Video.

It is an interview with Megan Prelinger of the Prelinger Archives in San Francisco. She talks about the reciprocal relationship between the evolution of our technology and our popular culture.

-Stay Tuned

The Crucible is a non-profit industrial arts school in Oakland. I have been teaching there in the Blacksmithing and Kinetics depts since 2007. Each year the put on a fundraising event that combines the work of local artists and performers.

This summers event is the called the Inferno-FireCircus.

- Stay Tuned

I know that this blog is dedicated to highlighting artwork and related topics. Nevertheless, I feel that situations like Fukushima and the multiple revolutions & wars being waged all over the planet are precisely the things that we should be making art about. It is hard for me to not make connections between these events and the and the the larger picture of who we all live out lives.

Here is a DIY video made by some local Fukushima residents. It seems to be in response to the government’s mishandling of the situation and the disinformation being created to ease the tension about the problem elsewhere in the world.

The fact remains though that there are a lot of people still living in what is an ecological and biological disaster area and the authorities do not seem to be doing much about it.

The video makers are calling for help evacuating the children and elderly from the area.

-Stay Tuned

The rebels in Libya have been transforming various mechanic shops and work spaces in their cities into weapons facilities to fight Gadaffi’s forces.

Two things come to mind when I watch this video. The first is how similar this seems to our own history when the mills and factories of America sidelined their normal operations and converted themselves into weapons producers for the war efforts of WWII.

The other thing I think of is what the situation in Libya would look like if it were ever to happen here in the U.S.

-Stay Tuned

The Bay Area Maker Faire is over and I am already thinking of new projects to exhibit next time. It was a huge event this year and I am a little bummed that I did not get to see everything.

Some highlights for me were:

The Slaperoo – a percussive musical instrument using high tension steel bands.

Ira Sherman – A metalsmithing veteran who makes prosthetic art.

And Arc Attack’s performance of the Dr. Who theme song.

Donald Bell and Eric Franklin from CNET-TV also showed up and interviewed me and the rest of the Applied Kinetic Arts group. There is a podcast attached to the end of the video where the interviewers talk further about their experience at makers.

-Stay Tuned

Starting today and continuing each month I am going to write briefly on an artist that I like. These won’t be too critical and heady, just a quick highlight of some work that I think is interesting.

I would like to begin with someone whose work got me to consider large numbers, and subsequently played a part in guiding me to the path I am currently on.

Chris Jordan is a photographer who is known for two major bodies of work. The first is an ongoing series of images comprised of repeating objects. I believe that he shoots several of these objects, then digitally multiplies and arranges them into larger patterns that reflect our culture of excess and waste.

The second body of work is more of a documentary style. He travels to Midway Island where he shoots birds that have died from ingesting too many bits of plastic. The carcasses lie decomposing around small piles of garbage where their stomachs once were.

Both of these bodies of work are visually stunning and had an emotionally profound effect on me.

- Stay Tuned

My friend and former classmate from the Maine College of Art, Vivian Beer, was written up in the American Craft Magazine this week.
Check it out.

- Stay Tuned