I came up with the idea for Cycle a few months before the end of the semester. Having built small scale kinetic sculptures in the past, I wanted to create something larger which would allow people to directly impact the sculpture itself. The idea of using a bicycle seemed like both an easy way to bring motion to the sculpture, as well as to draw people into the project.
I originally conceived the content to be of a decaying city, one which the user would experience over the course of its time. Due to time constraints, the project ended up more as an exploration for immersion within a model space. As the user peddles the bicycle, the mechanical system directly spins the gigantic foam wheel decorated with a variety of model railroad trees and landscape pieces covered with acrylic paint and flocking powders. The PS3 eye webcam is placed at the bottom of the sculpture, capturing the image from the spinning wheel upside down. This image is then run into the computer which sends it back out to the monitor mounted on the wall. With the installation for the winter show, I placed a sheet which separated the model world from the bicycle in order to create the moment of surprise upon realizing that the two experiences were linked. On the second day, I added a flap so that the bicycle rider could experience both sensations from the comfort of the bike seat.
The participant experiences the model world from a first person perspective which is enhanced through the user being directly responsible for the speed that the worlds passes by. I hope in future iterations of the project to build additional modeled worlds onto alternate discs, which would allow for a movie-like selection process.
The piece was well received at the ITP 2011 Winter Show, creating many a giddy smile with the realization of how the project functioned. It was also featured on DSN Radio.
For the second Biomechanics assignment, I had to pick a joint in the human body and map one plane of motion towards both limits of rotation. I decided early on to go with the flexion / extension of the wrist since it allows for such a wide range and because with computers nowadays it seems there are a lot of wrist injuries (or at least people wearing wrist braces on the floor at ITP). I was able to find this post within the osteoarthritis section of About.com. According to that site, the wrist has 90 degrees of extension and 70 degrees of flexion. I then dutifully moved my wrist to confirm the accuracy of these numbers with myself. With this information, I set out to design a two gear system that would show both directions of the wrist simply by turning one gear.
I attached the first gear to the wrist, and pulled two of the teeth out of place to act as stoppers, preventing further motion. The other gear is used to simulate the motion of the wrist, and the two rectangles function as a frame to hold both gears in place.
Upon finishing my design, the laser cutter on the floor at ITP ceased to function which left me with a decision on whether or not to continue my project. Since I had already spent the time designing the system, I decided it would be best to print out the pieces on paper and use them as a guide and cut everything out of wood.
I had not used the scroll saw much, but it did a fairly good job at cutting out the different teeth sections, enough to allow the gears to mess somewhat successful.
Start Position:
Flexion position:
Extension position: There are also marks on the side of the outer gear in order to indicate when it has reached each point (although it doesn’t spin past this point, I thought it a good idea to label them as well). Next step would be to add another set of gears in a perpendicular plane and allow the wrist to both adduct and abduct.
Erin Hanlon and Cynthia Bir published their research on validating the HITS (head impact telemetry system) in collecting data for soccer playing. The HITS system is normally associated with sports like Football and Boxing since both already have a helmet for which to design a sensor system. Soccer poses additional challenges since the head is also a vital part of the sport itself. The two authors of the paper set out to test collision types including the ball hitting the head and multiple head collisons, all from various angles.
The two authors were able to justify statistically that the headband / HITS system was able to accurately collect head acceleration readings during the course of play. This particular study interested me because I had not heard about HITS. While growing up I had played a fair amount of soccer and I remember the warnings against heading the ball and the damage that such an action could cause. It seems empowering and helpful that the effects of the acceleration on the head can be measured for soccer to determine whether these warning are justified and therefore to improve the safety of the sport, or to put the rumor to rest.
Michael Rosen, Rhodes Edewor-Thorley and myself worked together to create an intervening art installation project on top of the Highline Park. we first started by spending a great deal of time selecting our location. My previous experience of the Highline had been almost exclusively included traveling through the space of the park, so almost immediately we knew as a group that we wanted to use a less transient place than just the walkway. With this in mind we decided almost immediately to use the 10th avenue theater located on the Highline Park at the intersection of 10th avenue and 17th st.
With our observations of this space, we realized that it was one of very few places on the Highline where one can get away from the busy flow, and suspend time in a way. The theater creates a continuous show from the events that transpire along 10th avenue, and by separating the viewer from these events (placing them above the street, removed by glass and tone) it creates an audience separated from NYC. The focal point exists outside of the seating area, and we decided we wanted to bring it back into the space.
Another thing we found as a group was that despite the hustle and bustle going on around the theater, time almost seemed to be absent within. During the course of the discussion, my group completely lost track of time and sat for well over half an hour. Also in reference to Vito Acconci, we had a desire to see time reemerge as a public construct, even if it would inevitably be supported by the technological privatization of such.
These two concepts of focal point and time met head on with our idea to place a clock onto the actual structure of the steel support beams.
We recognized the ultimate importance of the design of the clock. Since we were interested in matching the space and encouraging a more subtle disruption, we brainstormed on the most effective design for matching the space. In the end we decided on a black clock with a white face and arabic numerals. We both ordered a clock off of Amazon and purchased one from Ikea, choosing in the long run to go with this Ikea clock.
The first attempt at installation failed because there was not a smooth way to place the hook on the wall and hang the clock with the way that the angles matched up. The audience in the Highline seemed amused by the performance, but in order to get an accurate reaction we left the space for some time to start with a fresh audience.
Returning about half an hour later, the installation problem was rectified by placing the hook inside of the clock beforehand and using wall sticky tac to adhere to the steel structure. With a simple hard push, the clock stuck to the wall and stayed there.
One other subtle change we employed was to set the clock 10 minutes fast. We figured a clock on time would be effective for altering the space, but that we could also cause a small amount of anxiety by forcing people to momentarily believe that they were late (or that the time was later than it was in generally).
We then sat for the next half an hour observing. At first the occupants of the theater had seen the installation and were more focused on the performative aspect, looking around for where I went following the installation. As we sat there longer however, people had not seen the installation and therefore the clock created an impression of belonging there. We caught quite a few people glancing at watches and phones in momentary panic, before being reassured of the actual time.
About half an hour into our experiment, Highline Officials noticed the clock and began to subtly panic, including making a number of radio or walkie-talkie calls.
In the end we were able to explain our position and recover our clock.
I think overall we were rather successful with the project. We achieved our aims of disrupting the space and altering an individual’s behavior all with minimal intrusiveness. On thinking for the next iteration, I would like to play around with the design of the clock more, as well as continuing to think about the placement of the clock.
Overall the project was super informative in approaching the thought process behind the make up of a space. In conjunction with the readings, this project illuminated several concepts from thinking about the composition of the audience, the flow of a space, as well as how to approach installation and observing the finished piece. The in-class critique was great at reinforcing that we had succeeded in presenting our message, but I also took away the idea that there is further room to explore the same concepts we set down initially, and alternative ways to approach these same topics in the future.
References:
Vito Acconci, Public Space in a Private Time (1990)
William Whyte, The Design of Spaces, City: Rediscovering the Center (1988)
Erving Goffman, (Relations in Public) Microstudies of Public Order (1980)
While CNC Drilling is often used for mass production, the drill is often part of a multi-tool machine that spins and mills pieces as well. There a wide range of machines out there with manual or automatic bit switching, and either single or multi-axis capabilities.
With the proper bits and lubrication, CNC Drill machines can handle a wide range of material including wood, plastic, metal, circuit boards, etc.
Since CNC drilling can be done on a variety of machines, the file formats also vary widely. This includes:
.sldprt (Solidworks), .prt(ProE), AutoCad (.ipt and .dwg) as well as other 3d CAD System outputs.
Most companies that have at least a single CNC machine will be capable of CNC Drilling.
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Laser Cutter.
Note: I will soon include Illustrator files as well as the Arduino code / wiring diagrams for recreating all of these mechanisms, so keep an eye open for that.
For Mechanisms and Things that Move, my final project was a long work in progress. Around the time of midterms, I knew that I wanted to create a narrative automaton. I quickly realized that this goal would not be finished in time for a midterm project so I set my sights on making this a final project.
Gabriela Gutierrez and I realized that we had similar interests in building mechanisms / automatons and decided to work together on this final project. We discussed a variety of potential stories at the beginning of the project to explore including those taken from children’s books, mythology, and the bible. In the end, inspired by both Alexander Calder, we elected to create a circus. One benefit of using the circus motif over one of the other narratives is that the story of the circus is independent of a timeline, so it makes sense that the automaton is continuous rather than having a set beginning middle and end which would have to be somehow reset.
Originally we planned to have one timing belt drive the entire circus, including all of the independent circus acts. We realized that in the event one of our circus acts failed, it would bring the whole mechanism to a halt. We opted instead to run the mechanisms independently, mitigating any failure from one of them.
One of the first things that Gaby and I did was to figure out how best to create a supply of gears. In experimenting with the laser cutter and making gears, Gaby and I created a bunch of gears using Inkscape’s gear rendering function, which we then copied to Illustrator in order to cut them on the laser cutter. Inkscape has a goofy quirk in that it lets you select the gear size in pixels as opposed to real measurements, but since we were not planning on using any off-the-shelf gears, we did not worry about this. All of the gears we used in the project had a diametral pitch of 20 pixels, which meant that any time we produced a new gear we knew it would interface perfectly with all of our older gears as well. Unless otherwise noted, all material used in this project was this material, chosen to set up a juxtaposition by using wood as precision pieces. Embarassingly enough (though successful) the adhesive of choice was hot glue, with the occasional use of super glue (mostly to keep nuts in place on spinning threaded rods). All circus performers were created in illustrator, mostly by tracing and altering existing images online.
Our first challenge was to tackle building a path for our audience members to view the circus. We purchased this belt, but elected to not by the timing belt pulleys that went along with it. This however led to our first great success with the laser cutter. Gaby and I were able to find an illustrator file online matching the belt type (L-series which means a pitch of .375″). We tweaked the file and cut test pieces out of mdf before coming upon the exact size matching the belt. We were then able to print multiple copies of 1/4″ mdf timing belt pulley cross sections, which we then glued together to form the actual pulleys (5 high with one slightly larger on either end to form a guide). We chose 6 pulleys with the belt forming a hexagon. 5 of the pulleys are floating, with the 6th one attached to this motor, which drives the entire belt.
In the end, we finished with 5 circus acts and two sets of flags. I will tackle each of the circus acts separately because they all created vastly different problems.
The Man Shot Out of A Cannon
The Man shot out of a Cannon was the first circus act completed, but before that it went through several iterations. I knew right away that in order to make it successful, I would have to use a mechanism similar to those used in Planetary Gears, with the inside of the loop being geared and the outside of the loop being where the man would remain. I started by borrowing a few of the gears we had lying around (16 teeth) and created a large wheel-shaped gear with the teeth in the interior. I originally toyed with drilling holes into a block of wood to space smaller gears equidistant on the opposite sides of the large gear, but this was a fools endeavor as I could never perfect the alignment on the drill press. I elected instead to use the laser cutter again to build cross bar pieces that would maintain the correct distance. This allowed me to set the gears on cut 5/16″ threaded rod pieces, and then to let the large gear rest on the smaller gears. I then cut more supporting cross bars so that the wheel could be suspended above the table. I turned one threaded rod into a motor shaft by using the metal lathe to cut a small hole in one end before super gluing the rod directly to the motor. Initially the motor would spin freely instead of spinning the large gear because it required less effort / had less friction. I remedied this problem by creating a motor collar around the front and back of the (geared dc) motor , secured with smaller pieces of threaded rod (3 #8-32 and one 1/4″ piece all about 2 inches long). The actual man was also laser cut and attached to the outside of the wheel.
I had a lot of problems with the violence of the spinning undoing nuts placed onto the threaded rods, so I used superglue to clamp them down in place. Also worth noting is that there is a weight attached to the bottom of the motor collar to keep the entire thing balanced.
Tiger Jumping Through A Hoop
The tiger jumping through the hoop was the second mechanism/circus act created. We knew that we wanted a rhythmic motion that would convert the motor spinning in a circle into something that moved back and forth, so we settled on this mechanism. Once that was decided, it was just a matter of making sure the parts were scaled to the correct length and that the tiger would fit through his own hoop (this took three separate iterations). As in the Man Shot from a Cannon, all of the gears and other pieces are attached together using threaded rods.
Dancers
The dancers were the third mechanism created. Gaby and I decided we wanted something beautiful, but also simple. By attaching the dancers both to gears, they spin in opposite directions and also only require one motor. Gaby had endless issue getting the stepper motor to work with the Darrington Array (frying at least one Arduino in the process) but in the end by switching to H-bridges and using the code / arrangement available on Tom Igoe’s post on stepper motors we were able to work through the problems and get the dancers to twirl together. There were also a few issues with the axle of the second dancer causing too much friction and consequently the motor to stutter, but this was fixed by making sure both gears were aligned above the platform to reduce friction.
Tightrope Walker
This circus act uses a rack and pinion set to push the tightrope walker forward and backwards along his walking path. Originally I had planned on attaching the tightrope walker directly to the toothed rack, but Luis Violante suggested (and provided) piano wire as well as the idea to attache a counterweight and keep the walker himself upright. There is a stepper motor on the base of the circus attached to a threaded rod which goes up to the rear platform of the tightrope. There is a pinion attached to the rod, which pushes the rack forward and backwards. The rack has the wire attached to the front of it, run across the length of the circus to a second platform at the front which acts as a guide. Guides above the rack prevent it from jumping out of place (though these guides are not tightened down). There were also a few issues with friction and the stepper motor slipping but these were solved by repositioning the pinion gear higher on the rod.
Elephant pushing a ball
The elephant pushing a ball was the last circus act constructed. While this circus act was originally conceived as “An Elephant Riding a Ball,” the balance required for this did not work out quite as well as I had hoped. Luis Violante also had several helpful suggestions for this circus act, including forcing a hole through the ball with a hollow rod and pushing wire through the rod to allow rotation with minimal friction. Jen Shannon was also nice enough to lend us a high-powered stepper motor to push both the elephant and ball around in a circle. The elephant was designed to be an assembly of three parts: two leg cross sections with bodies and tails that matched up, and a set of ears to be placed perpendicularly over the elephant. I then drilled a hole through one elephant and attached another piece of wire through its body. I attached the elephant and the ball with the somewhat less than pretty solution to the motor by using large globs of hot glue directly to the motor shaft. When the motor is activated, the ball rolls and the elephant appears to gallop after it.
Flags
The Flags were constructed by Gaby and are each a set of three. They are directly attached to a servo motor (with two sets of flags in total). The servo motors are attached back to back, and when the flags are activated the flags rotate in opposite direction, first away from each other and then towards each other, stopping in a place somewhere in-between.
Electrical
The nest of wires we have hidden underneath the circus stage is slightly less than pretty, but worked as long as nothing got too jostled. The audience members (wooden people attached to the timing belt) trigger roller switches as they travel their path around the circus. These roller switches are hooked up to Arduinos (three in all) which then tell the motors to activate. For DC motors requiring a trigger (the cannon and the tiger) the Arduino sends a signal to a transistor which allows current to flow through to the motor of one of those circus acts. A timer allows this current to flow for a set period of time (1.5 seconds) before the signal from the Arduino stops and the transistor stops allowing the motor current. For circus acts attached to the stepper motors (elephant, dancers and tightrope walker) the Arduino uses the stepper library to run through a set number of steps. The dancers and the tightrope walker move forward and then backwards, while the elephant completes enough steps to finish a rotation and a quarter. The belt itself is run by a dc motor on continuously. Most of the circus acts required only the five volts provided by the Arduino, but the tiger and the audience members are run off a laptop power supply which provides twelve volts and up to 3 amps of current. We had one minor issue with this amount of power just before the second day of the show, when I observed a smoking transistor connected to the Tiger which burned out the motor as well as burning myself when I went to remove it. Note to all: Electricity is powerful, be careful.
Reception
The circus was well received at the ITP Spring Show (2011). The vast majority of the acts did not work during the first day with only the dancers, the flags, and tightrope walker being the only ones full functional and the cat and cannon available with a request. People still seemed to love the look and feel of the circus, even though it was not interactive at this stage.
Day Two we had everything up and running (except for the Tiger burning out just as the day started). One thing that was really amazing about the crowd is that they would form a half circle about four to five feet away from the circus table and stare for minutes at a time. It was nice to see the same motions that mesmerized me over and over again were able to do the same thing for other people.
Future Goals
One of the things we had originally wanted to include but failed to create for this iteration was a way for the observers to interact with the automaton. With the future version, I would like to include a crank which lets an observer control the audience members at his or her own pace, but still only allowing the wooden audience members to trigger the various circus acts. On the first day of the show someone suggested to build this type of mechanism into arcade machines and have it be coin operated which is a path I plan on exploring this summer. For the time being the Circus is on display at the Summer Gallery at ITP, but I plan on polishing it a bit more before beginning to submit it to other galleries or art competitions. I also plan on writing instructables for the individual circus acts to provide a more step by step plan for those interested in recreating or tweaking what we created.
Overall I learned a lot about constructing mechanisms, using the laser cutter, group work, and the simple pleasure of both creating something and watching it move. I plan on using the skills I gained from working on this project heavily in my future work.
Special Thanks to those who helped document the project: Alex Kozovski & Spike McCue.
For my computational cameras final project I originally had a grandiose plan of an elaborate Augmented Reality application for the iPhone that would allow me to create animated cartoon-like worlds over the surrounding New York City landscape. Originally I had thought that because of a brief foray into OpenFrameworks and C++ I would be able to easily compile a proof of concept involving Broadway in front of the Tisch Building and a rolling pool ball. As I pushed forward with this idea, it quickly became clear that I was not going to learn OpenFrameworks (or Objective C) in the mere 2-3 weeks before the project was due. The next step was to return to using one of many AR platforms already out there to place my idea into the space.
I had attempted to work with Junaio a bit for a previous project, and again I found myself fighting with the 3d formats. While I was able to upload stationary 3d objects within the .obj file, these files don’t allow encapsulation of animation data. Junaio allows use of the .MD2 format (a format originating with a video game from over 15 years ago) but throughout my search I was unable to find a .MD2 converter for Blender, Maya 2011, or Cinema 4d. I realized however as I did more research into the other AR platforms function (Layar and Metaio) that I was not able to access animation features at this time. It was at this time that I decided to step back from the 3d element.
Per feedback from class, I decided instead to try and focus on using color tracking and animated 2d imagery in location. It was pointed out to me that it would be nice to replace the abundance of Taxi cabs with something (or anything) else, and these seemed like the perfect target for animated rolling pool balls bouncing down the street. This idea still focused on the mobile idea (desiring to be able to do this within actual New York streets) and therefore still involved mobile platforming. I decided it would be worth it to attempt on the Android platform using Processing for Android.
I wrote a quick color tracking sketch in processing based on Daniel Shiffman’s example from Learning Processing. I also used components from the guicomponent library to allow the user to drag a slider in order to adjust the color on the fly for tracking (with a swatch of the current color to be tracking up in the corner). The sketch looks like this:
(Code is available at the bottom of the page)
As I began to shift this sketch to Android, Zach Schwartz let me know that from a conversation with Daniel Shiffman, the Processing framework is at this time unable to use it’s video libraries with any success on the Android platform. Having realized that this severely limited the projects that Zach and I wanted to do independently, we decided to combine forces and come up with a new project.
We started with Zach’s previous Video Sculpture project where the user revealed pieces of one scene from the horror movie “The Shining.” We had originally planned to continue with the theme of horror and fright.
In discussions about the project, as well as the beginnings of building our code, we quickly realized that the horror circumstance was not going to turn out as we planned. Zach and I left the floor to buy a flashlight to use for our project, and in returning we had come up with a new project. We decided that it was best to embrace the hokey and go with the theme of “finding love” around spots in the city. For the first iteration we decided to go with Washington Square Park to film various scenes around the park, catching park-goers as they continued their daily lives.
Our project included both an infrared camera and a flashlight with a visible light filter (aka developed blank film stolen from the photography department upstairs). As the user pointed the flashlight across a white screen, our projector revealed footage of Washington Square Park, as well as an animated heart that ran from the user (and shrank as it approached the top of the screen). Our video is here: Finding Love in Washington Square Park. Source Code is here.
Feedback from our final class was helpful. While the implementation of the actual hardware was very successful, our content left something to be desired. In the future, I believe that Zach and I would like to return to the horror environment, perhaps revealing things within a diorama setting or chasing shadows just out of reach around a room. All in all, computational cameras taught me a lot about the difficulties and advances in Computer Vision (hint: the Kinect solves a lot of problems out of the box…but not all) and in the future will take the knowledge I have gained into other projects.
For my Mechanisms final I am working with Gabriela Gutierrez and we have been working on constructing a timing-belt driven mechanical automaton circus inspired by Alex Calder and also the “Welcome to Duloc” information box in the movie Shrek.
Ideally we would like to include as many circus acts as we can, triggered by the passing by of our “audience” which will ride around on the timing belt. These circus acts will either be powered through mechanisms off of the belt, or otherwise will be triggered
So far, we have completed laser cutting/construction of the timing belt pulleys, acquired the actual timing belt, and have begun modeling/prototyping our actual circus acts. We have so far decided that for our acts we would like to include:
A man shot out of a cannon
A lion tamer
An elephant doing tricks (riding a ball or stepping onto a platform)
A clown riding a tricycle on a tightrope
a Trapezee
Our first priority is to get our timing belt in working order. We have become a bit ambitious about it, and wish for it to be on multiple levels…which introduces further complications for belt alignment. The sooner we get our timing belt in order (ideally at the latest by this Sunday) the sooner we can interface with it. Also of high priority is designing as separate systems all of our circus acts. So far we have designed the lion tamer and the man shot out of the cannon out of foamcore, which will allow us to create vector plans in order to laser cut the parts to recreate them in masonite. I believe that we are planning to have all of our mechanisms at least designed by the end of class on Monday. This allows us the option of discussing the most efficient mechanisms for the desired movement.
All we need to do following design of the mechanisms is construct them, and interface them with the overall timing belt. With this step complete by the end of Wednesday, it leaves us the remaining time to add any additional thematic elements (a sky tent / other non-moving exhibits etc) and for triple checking both our wiring and ensure that all of the exhibits turn on at the right times.
So, we should have a finished functional mechanical circus by the middle of next weekend… ideally.
Images to follow soon (including the scanned overall plan).
