marvelous mechanisms
Our week 3 assignment:
Pick one impressive machine/mechanism you consider art, and one you consider practical/functional. They don’t have to be electromechanical, but they have to move. Post pictures/videos on your blog and your response to the pieces. Be ready to share with the class.
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I have been doing some research on pneumatics for my thesis and I came across Chico MacMurtrie’s art work via a thesis peer, Morgen Fleisig!
Chico MacMurtrie was born in New Mexico in 1961. And formed Amorphic Robot Works in 1992.
He describes his vision, “The work is an ongoing endeavor to uncover the primacy of movement and sound. Each machine is inspired or influenced, both, by modern society, and what I physically experience and sense. The whole of this input informs my ideas and work.”
I am totally drawn to his work, mostly his exploration into inflatables. In my thesis I am working with an inflatable pair of lungs that will visualize the breath of the wearer and I am hoping to study what he did with the 16 birds project.
16 birds:
http://amorphicrobotworks.org/works/birds/index.htm
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Stapler. Let’s file that under one of the many underapprectiated functional mechanisms of the 20th century. Apparently the first known stapler was a handmade one for Louis the XV.
Stapler is basically an arrangement of springs – coil and leaf springs. If I understand it correctly, the coil spring feeds the staples along the magazine and the leaf spring returns the stapler to it’s original position.
But while the stapler is great for everything from interoffice memos to local show announcements, surgical staplers are revolutionary and changed the game (according to my boyfriend, not as much as electro cautery…) Surgeons use surgical staplers in place of sutures to close the skin.
It is shaped differently from the standard paper stapler. Wikipedia’s description of it’s function: “Pressing the stapler into the skin and applying pressure onto the handle bends the staple through the skin and into the fascia, until the two ends almost meet in the middle to form a rectangle.
Staplers are commonly used intra-operatively during bowel resections in colorectal surgery. Often these staplers have an integral knife which, as the staples deploy, cuts through the bowel and maintains the aseptic field. The staples, made from surgical steel, are typically supplied in disposable sterilized cartridges.”