Rat skeleton marionette. Anamorphic design in Illustrator then cut out of 1/4″ plexi on the laser. Some anatomy is a little off, and it looks kind of like a cat. Good try though.

Sandra Bollocks! But it didn’t function as intended!

It only took me a week. Well, because that’s all the time I had left after scrapping the giant rat costume.

Here’s the assembly in process, with the first iteration of the tail vertebrae.

Close-up on first iteration of the back leg. Wish I had taken more close-up shots of the elegant solutions to anamorphic design problems.

Hanging out. Since it didn’t work properly. A lunging pose, perhaps. More ribs would have been better, longer front legs, and smaller back legs. More spacing in the joints and a better carriage mechanism for the shoulders. Too many puppet points. Not enough weight where it was needed, and too much where it wasn’t. Plus, designing the paddles at 5pm the day it’s due, after not sleeping a wink, and doing the final Rodent Academy class from 8:30-4, was bound for failure. A good first try, and fun to work on, though. Maybe something will come out of this effort besides the occupation of storage space.

This is how the piece look in the Illustrator file. The different colors correspond to order of cutting– black, red, and then blue. This is the 3rd iteration of the pieces, and some are missing because I didn’t re-cut them.

And I wish there was something more MECHANICAL about it.

I intend to create a series of interactive sculptures and performances that double as footage for a video documentary about the problematic relationship between humans and wild rats in New York City. The performances will be informed by observing rats in their urban habitats. I will collect field data about rats through immersion. I will spend time watching rats, recording their activities, imagining the world from a height of three inches. In my preliminary plans one exciting question about creative research has already emerged: to what extent does the artist/researcher go to understand the subject? Once raw data has been collected, how might it be used in an artistic context? I will explore the notion of wildlife ethnography by embodying the data.

I plan to inhabit an anatomically correct rat costume and engage the public. The costume will be used for improvising behavior in a variety of contexts, from street interaction to installation, enacting scenarios that deal with duality in contemporary rats as perceived by humans: hated vermin or clever pet, intelligent adversary or negative force of nature. In chapter 10 of A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop the concept “becoming-animal” to capture the notion of human-animal relationships based on affinity rather than identity or imitation. I will inhabit this costume daily for a specific duration. Video and sound equipment embedded in the costume will provide me with an augmented reality, with all first-person POV encounters and activities recorded wirelessly to a computer, and possibly streamed live to the web. My assumption is that building a new skin will enable me to physically expand the boundaries of the data-conscious body as it exists in space. The broadcast performance, in addition to the live-stream rat burrows, will take the data collected in a specific site and distribute it virtually, thereby recasting the information as a non-local phenomenon.

Another aspect of the rat costume will be explored by making rudimentary rat body parts out of garbage and raw materials. These parts will be worn all at once, or alone, to help understand the form factor of a rat as it exists in space, to reference the ways in which rats sense and influence the environment around them, and comment on the problematic relationship we have with rats in New York– they live off of our trash. Their existence and ability to propagate directly correlates to our inability to keep our own environment free of refuse. As humans, refuse and waste are endemic to our existence. These garbage elements are a more poetic approach to embodying the rat, they don’t hide the human underneath, rather they seem to bring attention to the human condition of lower sensory resolution (except sight). One example is a oblong shape reminiscent of an analog TV antenna jutting from the top of my head: it speaks to the science fiction of human mind control (which is currently being done to rats in labs), as well as referencing the direct neural stimulation rats receive when their whiskers encounter an object in their environment.

Here is a link to my budget as of now. The project will move forward beyond the end of class, thus some elements are not included because they are as of yet unknown.

These are previous posts to my blog that outline a bit more detail for some of the mechanisms and wearables that I’ve been working on.

http://itp.nyu.edu/~av849/blog/?p=632

http://itp.nyu.edu/~av849/blog/?p=640

http://itp.nyu.edu/~av849/blog/?p=591

In order to bear the weight of my body and the entire rat costume without getting exhausted and TOTALLY sore, I’m building a partial exoskeleton that will relieve some of the load, even if it does end up limiting my ROM a bit. It’s still really basic. I have to make a wrist joint (I’m thinking torsion springs– from a rat snap trap!), secure things, and make a ball-and-socket-esque joint for the part that goes on my chest.

This mechanism will only bear my weight when I’m in a specific position, with the stock of the modified crutch aligned perfectly over the base, making a pillar. That’s tough to build onto a body that’s going to be moving around and changing orientation in relation gravity. Refining the relationship between the massive tension springs (Ace Hardware, $10) and the aluminum tubing will help the springs lock and prevent buckling. The shafts inside the spring are about 3 inches apart to allow for more flexion, with loose bolts preventing spring slippage along the shaft, but allowing slippage around the rotational axis. That means at the wrong orientation the springs easily buckle. Too many degrees of movement… must find the happy balance.

The spring on the rear side is placed lower on the shaft to allow for spiraling around my arm, similar to how our muscles spiral/wrap around our bones, which are also spirals. The whole dang human body is a collection of spirals. Eventually I want my hand to be completely free, not holding on to the handle of the crutch, so thumbs can operate the pan-tilt camera eyes and the fingers can puppeteer the rat fingers.

I’m imagining something similar to chest armor, but without the faux leather pants and pads, though I like the rigid plastic spine– good for mods. Right now the center of gravity falls into the crook of my arm, but if I modify that part into an L shape going towards my center, with a joint that allows weight bearing and a quarter sphere’s worth of ROM, and increase the surface area that interfaces with my chest, I can spread the load from one point to possibly my entire upper torso.

Below is the demo-video with a free stand. Imagine both arms having this mechanism.

General sketches, not much detail– it’s hard to imagine the detail of specific parts without having built much. Gotta start building. Four weeks left!

Inside the rat suit I’ll need supports and struts to build up the bulk that my body doesn’t have. The proportions of a rat are very different than that of a human. One-to-one from top to bottom, my feet end up in the rat’s balls, my pelvis in the stomach. The mobility and expressiveness of a rat’s head and upper torso are very important to maintain, so I will try to fill those spaces as much as I can with my own body parts. The lower half will not need to be as expressive. It’ll serve me well to create an ease to the functionality of the hind legs. My feet will be in the ankle, flexed on the toes, and the rest of my legs off-set from where the rat’s legs would have to go. I may have to fudge the position of my knee just to make it feasible to walk around in the suit. Then my ankle would be the rat’s ankle. The foot/leg joint would have torsion springs to make me bouncy and relieve strain. In order to sit upright as the rat without putting excess strain on my ankles and knees, I’d build in a hard chair-like block that I could sit on, and that would lend a rigidity to the lower spine/sacral area. The tail will likely need to be controlled by servos, and the servos in turn controlled by my hands.

Each hand will have a set of dual-axis potentiometers and buttons encased in some material (silicone most likely, for the flexibility and shock absorption) casted to fit my hand. One pair of potentiometers would control the pan-tilt servo camera eyes in parallel, and the other pot would control the expression of the ears, flat back to erect, rotate. The switches, or another pair of pots, would control the tail. The tail would have articulated vertebrae with excessive recoil controlled by torsion springs or extension springs, or both. The fingers will be articulated by track-wire system such that each of my fingers will have direct control over the tip of each rat finger. The hands, without electro-mechanical elements, will be gloves made of some durable, flexible, expressive material– silicone? Or something lighter weight with just the ground interfacing a really tough material. The back feet will also be made of this. Whatever part of the rat interfaces with the abrasive ground will need to be robust. Time to make a trip to the Materials Connexion…

Drawing human bodies over photos of rat skeletons or xrays is a good way to understand how the two anatomies intersect, or don’t.

After making two laps of the ITP floor on all fours, imagining I was in the heavy costume, getting out of breath and thirsty, pausing to listen and look, sniff and feel, I realized that I’ll need some kind of lightweight exoskeleton to relieve my arms of some of the strain and lactic acid build up that will occur quite quickly. In each of the joints will be a high torque torsion spring that will want to make the arms straight. It’ll add a spring to my foreleg steps. I shall need to train, as well. Cardio, strength, endurance, stamina. I guess it’s time to get back into shape… I hate the gym.

In 2006 I spent a lot of time as a dog. It was a different sense of the world. Not acting, or imitating, but actually being a dog. Becoming-dog. This was well before I’d heard of D&G (Deleuze and Gottari, not Dolce and Gabana). This will be good to do for rats too.

This GIF was downloaded from this site: http://nuk.klinikum.uni-muenchen.de/research.php

This is the updated list of projects I’m planning, as they exist in my head right now. It’s really hard to make the transition from pure envisioning and writing to actually making. It’s like a giant turd one puts off releasing in anticipation of the pain and suffering. It only gets worse. Sometimes there is pleasure in pain, but I’d rather have the stuff I think talk to the stuff I make, and vice versa, back and forth, forever.

The real world rarely measures up to the way things are in raw imagery in my head. There is a compromise with real space that is similar to the compromise that happens when a raw work or raw performance is developed and refined– the trade-off is ecstatic rawness for intention and design. It’s very hard to do both, especially in improvisatory performance where the excitement one perceives when it’s known the artist is composing in real-time, the raw decision-making process is very difficult to maintain through the refining and editing process. I’m dragging on… more on those ideas later. Now, onto the ideas:

1) The rat costume. This costume will be used to enact scenarios and behavior in a variety of contexts, from unmitigated street interaction, to composed fairytale, to a series of syllogisms that deal with duality of contemporary rats as perceived by humans, hated vermin or clever pet, etc. This costume is also meant to reference the notion that more mediation is more effective/better– more technology will enhance experience, more immersion will create deeper meaning.

A question: to what extent does the artist/researcher go to understand the subject? In this case, and in the cases of Timothy Treadwell and Barbara Smuts, there are very few boundaries between the studier and the studied. Treadwell’s work with Grizzlies and Smuts’s work with baboons read closer to the work of ethnographers like Napoleon Chagnon, who spent time with the Yanomamo in the Amazon. There is nothing distant or objective about embedded observation/study. In my case I make performances with the intention of someday showing something to someone. The assumption is that building a new skin for myself will enable me to expand the boundaries of my body as it exists in space, to have the rat costume be an extension of my body the way a car or a horse does. Since I cannot shrink myself to the size of the rat to enter their colony, I will present myself to them as the Rat King, largest of them all, to see if I can gain their allegiance. I will present myself to the public and see if I can gain their acceptance. To see as the rat sees, to hear as the rat hears…

I blogged about some technical aspects here and here. These posts deal primarily with how to make the jaw mechanism. I also want to make pan tilt servo systems for the eyes, which will be micro cameras I will use for vision. The video imagery captured by the cameras will be displayed on micro TFT screens in front of my eyes, stereoscopically, and with night vision via IR LEDs. I already built this part of the system last year (see my banner above!) thanks to this Instructibles tutorial. To add to the head portion of the rat costume, I want to make a self-contained hearing/vocalization system with microphones, speakers and headphones. I also intend to make a system by which I can eat and drink through the mouth of the rat head. On the other end of the costume is a tail, possibly operated by servos to make it swish back and forth, and with a hinge at the base to accommodate sitting up, like a tripod. Lastly, I intend to construct an excretory system to allow me to urinate and defecate out while encased in the rat costume. With all my basic bodily functions taken care of, I could conceivably spend weeks in the costume, taking breaks only to recharge batteries (I could sleep at those times), depending on my level of endurance.

Probably one of my influences in this decision comes from artist Oleg Kulik, who spent time as a dog in a gallery in Soho, titled “I Bite America and America Bites Me,” and obvious nod to influential artist, Joseph Beuys, who spent a week with a coyote in a gallery in Soho, titled “I Like America and America Likes Me.” Here’s a video of Beuys talking about it, with clips of the installation (the full film is on view at the MoMA). The skin of my rat costume might be interchangeable depending on which version of rattus norvegicus I want to represent– for example, a “sewer” rat, an albino lab rat, a lilac rex fur fancy rat. The lab rat skin might have chunks missing, open wounds, velcro points for attaching equipment or probes. A transgenic rat could be hairless, or covered in human hair. The fancy rat could have a diamond harness. The very act of skinning the rat costume could be a process incorporated into the “performance”. I’m envisioning a robust wearable object.  Another interesting aspect that may end up playing a role is that the well-known Hindu deity of wisdom and intellect, Ganesha, is sometimes transported in the belly of a giant rat, and is usually depicted with rats at his feet. It might be interesting explore that idea further in light of the fact that I’ll be inside a giant rat. Tenuous, maybe.

2) The rat catcher. At the end of March I’ll be participating in the Rodent Academy, a free course offered to “train private pest control professionals, building owners, landlords, restaurant operators.” It’s taught by Robert Corrigan, PhD, a rodentologist who is often called in to solve rodent infestation problems and design campaigns toward rodent control in urban settings. I’ve been granted special dispensation to participate in the class. With this class I intend to create a human persona that I can don, like a pair of coveralls, in order to complete a specific task. The task is to kill a rat and use the body in some sculptural way (maybe a mechanized way). I am unopposed to killing animals in a meaningful or purposeful way. Though I have been in the presence of plenty of dead and dying animals, and have held them as they exhale their life, I have never killed an animal myself, with my hands. Certainly that is a product of growing up in the city, and not killing the meat I eat. My relationship to animals thus far has remained in the realm of pets and veterinary practice. Being able to attribute this act to a different person, a role played by me, I imagine I can offset the feelings of guilt and psychological trauma that come with casting oneself as a killer. There will also be aspects of this prong of the rat project that deal with the Warrior’s Code, which appears in this blog post about the Animals/People mid-term.

Why would I feel guilty or have psychological trauma? Aren’t non-pet rats vermin that nobody cares about? Isn’t there a lot of money spent on effectively killing rats? What’s the big deal?

In my life I’ve had nine pet rats, three from pet stores who most likely would have sold them as snake food, two tiny orphan lab rats from my high school who would have died (we hand raised them on Mother’s Milk), and four left over lab rats who would have been sent away for snake food. My intuition tells me to live and let live. Death saddens me. This is in direct conflict with my lifestyle as a meat eater. I’m interested in this dissonance, but to justify killing a rat for art is very difficult. Finding a rat that’s already dead was more desirable but has it’s disadvantages and relies on chance. Since city rats have few if any natural predators, the pest control professional takes on this role. Casting myself in the role of a pest control professional creates a diametrically opposed relationship between me and the rat. I can excuse the act. What I do with the body has yet to be determined.

3) The documentary. I’m interested in playing with narrative forms as a way to encapsulate the disconnected array of projects I’m instigating, to unify them under one name. Given the fact that I intend to pretend I’m something other than myself, a false documentary about an artist or a person who needs to make the projects above in order to understand his own obsession with rats sounds about right. I’d be playing exaggerated versions of myself. I’m interested in finding sincerity in lies, taking a page from Herzog’s idea of the ecstatic truth, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” When attempting to make a true-to-life documentary account, it is impossible not to inject falsities to a certain degree. It is endemic to the form of cinema– the conscious serial arrangement or exclusion of content in time.

I have seen a lot of documentaries/mockumentaries, but have read little about the form, so these are my assumptions. The difference between a false documentary and a mockumentary is the depth to which the untruth is executed– in a mockumentary the content is not based in true reality, it’s all the made-up characters playing in scripted situations (Christopher Guest is a master of this, as are Ricky Gervais and the American version of The Office). The newer blends of mockumentary include incorporating unsuspecting real people into the story (Andy Kaufman’s I’m From Hollywood, Sasha Baron-Cohen’s work as Borat and Bruno, etc), and these forms blend truth and fiction in such a way that the viewer is aware of the pretense, and the object of humor is realized by exposing taboo opinions of unwitting participants. The teams of John Stuart and Steven Colbert use this technique when interviewing people. A lot happens in editing too. Not to paint myself a particular shade, but the documentary I want to make is something between the work of Andy Kaufman, Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, a true story transposed into the novel form, which is typically associated with fiction. The story is assembled by Capote who acts as a medium, giving voice to events that include central figures, but told from the outside, distantly, despite Capote’s role in the conclusion.

Documentation is a very difficult subject when it comes to performance and time-based art. What is a document of a performance? What is the performance without documentation? I suppose this project falls under the same taxonomy as Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, rather than the new work of Tino Seghal currently at the Guggenheim. I don’t think I’ll make portraits.

This is a post I meant to finish several weeks ago, but never did. I’ll post it now in the interest of showing how ideas are developing over time, but keep in mind a fair amount of the individual project information is stale. The first two projects are less likely now (though I still intend to taxidermize a rat).

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

This rat project is blooming. It feels good to be back tilling the fields after 7 months of fallow with no ideas. I’m still in the mental soup stage, in which I let my free associative brain wander and build connections on its own. This is a crucial stage and can’t be forced. If I try to BE CREATIVE and come up with ideas nothing will happen. It works best when I sit there and daydream, just let my subconscious drive the car and hold the map. It’s not a passive process. It’s like imagining your childhood bedroom in three dimensions and as much detail as possible. It’s like traveling through your neighborhood like a mental Google maps car with a third eye. How much detail can you see? This is when the wildest ideas come and censorship has no apparent role.

This envisioning inevitably produces solid images. The project as it exists in my head now is finished, wrapped up and presentable. What’s in my head is shallow, however, and nothing like the way it will really turn out, but that’s how I move through artistic processes: backwards revisions, like remembering the future. The trick is to be flexible in my thinking so the project can evolve on its own. For this, I allow decisions to be made based on coincidences and confirmations, I follow the serendipitous and the correlative signs that have no place in critical or logical progression of thought. Since I’m neither a scientist nor a truth-seeking artist, necessarily, an allegiance to the empirical is not needed. In a certain way, I have very little interest in truth since fiction can illicit the same emotional responses; a narrative discourse can be truthful without a basis in reality. I thank several artists and writers for this realization, most notably Roland Barthes, Deborah Hay and Omer Fast.

Now onto rats.

There are several projects I’m pursuing that all fall under the rat umbrella. Again, these ideas are imagined final products that help me understand the process as I move through. These are quite literal, with very little nuance. Not all of them will happen as depicted below, and there will be more that come up along the way.  Some of these may never happen at all! Here’s what I have so far:

1. Rat Abortion Apparatus: how to solve the rat problem. Picture this: a brown rat splayed on its back with it’s limbs stretched and pinned back. Brown fur is real, taxidermized from an NYC rat. The mouth is opening and closing ,the limbs are shuddering. A person is allowed to operate the controls, one of which operates a scalpel. Vivisection. The scalpel makes a T-cut from sternum to anus, like in an autopsy. Another control pries the incision open exposing the insides of the rat are exposed, but rather than guts there are countless rat fetuses made of green plastic. The control panel reminiscent of a back-hoe controls a scooper that excavates the rat. It seems rather real even though it is a simulation. The scooper is able to remove several fetuses at once, kind of like one of those games at the arcade that drops a mechanized hand onto a stuffed animal and drops it into a chute. Not a delicate process– brutal, direct, destructive. An antechamber behind the rat is filled with more plastic fetuses that are pushed upward as more are emptied. People can take home their prize. The apparatus distances the person from the repercussions of their actions, it emphasizes the machine as an enabler of gross activity. The entire interface could be viewed through a spy camera, which would add a layer of difficulty as well as distance. This may also draw parallels to surgery on humans. Is that a can of worms worth opening? I’m currently researching how to successfully taxidermize a rat. I have no interest in a store-bought rat or any other rat I would have to kill myself or know that someone killed for this purpose or something similar (feeding a snake or a science experiment). I am interested in a rat that I would find on the street, fresh, poisoned or maybe killed by a dog (I’ve seen this happen in Washington Sq. Park). There is a certain amount of respect and duty I feel towards rats as a species, and rather than using a produced rat, I’d rather use a rat that is the equivalent of road-kill in the country. A wild NYC rat A rat that wouldn’t have to die if we humans were not here. A rat that wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for us.
2. Rat Spermicide: sterilizes, safe and easy to use. Oral. Pellet form. A plastic bottle that looks like it could contain over-the-counter drugs like Advil. A safe alternative to poison. Sprinkle the same as poison, in safe area away from children and pets. Make a mold of a bottle, print label stickers with corporate design. Pellets are little, colorful, candy-like. Make a flowchart for use a la nyc.gov. This could also reference the fact that we humans have our own birth control problems. Why is the onus on the female to protect herself by taking birth control or telling the man to wear a condom? There should have been a male pill long, long ago. Here it is, but with obnoxious comments like: “It is time for men to have some control. I think it would empower men and deter some women out there from their nefarious plans…” According to Caroline Bragdon, an official at the NYC Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene with whom I spoke on the phone recently, the city has already tried sterilization as a means to control the rat population, but it didn’t work as well as simply killing the rats. One rat can breed hundreds of rats in the lifespan. Humane number reduction/control was trumped by simplicity and efficiency.
3. The rat costume. (will write more later)
4. Tracking wild rats in NYC using RFID, and camera traps. (will write more later)
5. A series of new rat trap designs based on the current relationship we have with rats. (more later)

At first, it was a great idea. Then it started to fall apart.

I based my ideas on these newer drawings that show how a compound pulley system might amplify my jaw motion. The drawings show the axis of rotation for the jaw above my forehead, which would put my head in the rats neck. Not quite right. And since I was mentally referring to these drawings when I built the framework and mechanism, those proportions are also incorrect. Back to the drawing board.

The left one above is the closest to what I should have made.

This is an “artistic rendering”.

I ordered parts from Pololu, made by Tamiya, thinking they would suit the nature of the bench build of the mechanism, namely the framework and the mechanical system, but the parts turned out to be difficult to use. First of all, they’re injection molded so in order to use a part I have to cut it away with a blade. The tolerance is not great on some pieces, with too much slip. Girders and shafts can be adjusted to suit the specs of the system, but it’s destructive, and the part may not be useful for another project later. You have to break the plastic pieces and cut the metals ones with a file.Basically you have to buy a crap load of parts and hope you don’t make mistakes. The metal hardware (nuts, bolts, screws, shaft collars, and shafts– no washers!) are quality, and there’s variety, but they don’t give you enough of them to make it easy. I had to dip into other sets for more bolts/nuts and shafts. There are these really horrible plastic nuts that you thread yourself by wrenching them onto the bolts. They only work once, and they don’t work for very long. The pulley wheels are okay, but the rubber bands are not, and neither are the plastic parts that keep the pulleys on the shafts. Those parts are tiny and very similar too each other but not easily identifiable– it would have been nice for there to be a color system. And again, there’s not enough of them. My review: not great for prototyping, but the parts can be used in projects in lieu of building small parts to spec out of wood or aluminum. Legos seem to be comparably priced with a lot more yield, especially reusability.

The disaster area:

So after wallowing for a night, I set out to build the frame and mechanism out of wood and aluminum, with just a smattering of Tamiya parts. I built a curved, aluminum jaw-like part that would interface with my jaw, and placed it between two wooden blocks. To the front of that I attached another piece of aluminum, the curve of which somewhat followed the line the jaw piece draws in the air, but it straightens a bit towards the top. That piece pulls on two cables that are threaded through two pairs of pulleys before reaching the rat jaw piece. A spring causes the rat jaw to recoil back into closed position. It’s basically a third class lever with two parts acting. Behold the phallic torture device reminiscent of a cardinal tombstone:

Main problems with this design are:

• static hang: when the mechanism is in the correct orientation, the minor weight of the wood I used for the jaw pulls on the spring. This problem is exacerbated when any motion is applied because of the uncontrollable bob and dangle action.
• spring tension: as the spring is extended, the tension increases and more power is needed to extend it further. My jaw works hardest when it is closed, and has the least force when fully open.
• there is no comfort.
• it is nowhere near head mountable.

To make it better I will try making the rat jaw lower on my head, closer to mine, and fit it around my head a little closer. Since I don’t want the rat costume to be ENORMOUS and unwieldy, I should spend a lot of time making the head smaller, and have less dead space in the inner real-estate. I need to split the work of the pulleys better, widening the space between them. In v.2 it may be that there are no pulleys and the rotational axis of the rat jaw is placed exactly over my jaw’s axis. If the piece that interfaces with my jaw is melded with the rat jaw, the motion will be 1:1. That would function along the same principal as a small pulley/gear sharing the axis of rotation with a large pulley/gear: the small rotational motion is amplified in size and speed. However, this would mean I need more power in my jaw.

Video of the torture device in action:

More pics/drawings are available in this Flickr set.

For the Mechanisms class mid-term I’m going to build the moving jaw mechanism for a wearable rat head. The mechanism I’ve decided on will be a pulley system that enables the motion of my jaw to control the motion of the rat jaw. The face of the rat head will not line up with my face, rather, it will point up from the top of my head so that when I walk on all fours it is in proper orientation, the way rats look. No electronics involved, as I want the natural action and nuance of real organic material. To that end, I must find an mechanical solution to amplifying the 2 axial rotational inches of movement my jaw is capable of to approximately 8 inches in the giant rat jaw. In order to visualize the problem I made some drawings on a white board, displayed below.

The first drawing shows the elements of the whole rat costume project, and the second drawing shows a rudimentary drawing of the elements of the jaw system. For the second drawing, I’m already seeing that two pulley systems on either side of my jaw may be more efficient and even allow for some side-to-side motion, like a real jaw, depending on how I design the point of rotation or joint where the rat jaw joins with the frame. Better drawings to come!

I’m planning to address the challenges of this system by optimizing the mechanism within following constraints:

1. Weight; the whole mechanism, including mounting materials, must not weigh more than an estimate of 5lbs. I will be mounting other hardware (cameras, tubing, eye-wear, microphones, headphones, a small speaker, among others). Ideally the frame/structure would be able to withstand impact if I run into things, support the sum total weight, and yet be light enough that my neck won’t get strained. I have some ideas about strain-relief, connecting the headpiece to a harness I wear on my chest. I will no doubt have to custom build some pieces due to the fact that it is difficult to create a durable, sturdy form factor when dealing with wearables.
2. Mechanical advantage; the use of pulleys rather than gears or motors will allow for a springiness in the action of the jaw, and a looseness in the fit. Gears would have to crafted well, fit together to work. Motors would require electricity, add weight, and probably seem more robotic than lifelike. Increasing mechanical advantage will be achieved by using several pulleys of different sizes in series– string or cable connected to my jaw will drive a large pulley, which will drive a small pulley, which will drive a large pulley, and so forth. I’m looking at compound bow design for this. The final step of the mechanism that activates the rat jaw will rely on a third class lever to give speed, which will be possible because I will have stepped up the strength of my jaw’s pull (25:1? 50:1?). The rat jaw will have a spring that will pop the jaw back into the closed position and hold it there.
3. Materials; the erector-set-like pieces found on Pololu seem like a good choice for the concerns outlined above. I plan on ordering the pulleys from that company, building the mechanism on a table, and then transposing it to a headpiece I’ll construct off of a welding helmet headset without the mask.

The timeline for this aspect of the project is as follows:

• March 1st, order parts!
• March 3rd, have drafts of drawings and as much of the measurements and sorted
• March 4th, receive pulleys and material in the mail and begin assembly on tabletop
• March 7th, have tabletop assembly completed and be ready for head mounting
• March 9th, finish head mounting and troubleshoot/tweak
• March 11th, present in class

Here’s my budget.

Many of the materials I will be using to build this prototype I already have, such as, string, cable, wood, tools and welding headgear. I’ve made the budget above to reflect the fact that some pieces will need to be altered and may break in the process. I have not budgeted any miscellaneous objects or hardware because I’m fairly certain I already have enough materials to complete this prototype.