-->

Eun Jung Park

Mechanical Wooden Face

Have a conversation with the wooden face!

Classes
Project Development Studio (Danny Rozin)


Mechanical Wooden Face is an interactive automaton and I focus on how to represent the facial expressions that I want by characterizing the face and its movements. A traditional way to generate the automata is turning a handle and this action creates the energy to move the automata but I want to create different kinds of interactivity. One set of automaton usually makes one movement and as long as you keep turning the handle, it shows a constant, repetitive movement and has a circular timeline. I would like to create more than one movement per automaton based on a linear timeline so that it can tell a story or react to a story.

This piece consists of mainly two parts; the face and the wooden belt. The wooden belt that consists of about 14 wide wooden penals has different height of bumps on it and when you roll down the belt, each bump hits a shaft wich is connected to each part of the face, such as eyes, eyebrows, a nose, cheeks and a jaw. The left side of the each panel has bumps as I said and the right side of each panel has lines from a children's story book. The face will be changed depending on the lines that you read to it.

Audience
Anyone who is interested in interacting with objects.

User Scenario
There will be a wooden face and a belt system which is made of wooden panels. Each panel has lines from the story book and people can read the lines penal by penal by rolling down the belt. Depending upon the lines, the wooden face will be changed. In other words it will give you some facial expressions such as laughing, boring etc.

Implementation
It is made of wood. There is no electricity. Everyting is operated by mechanisms.