Further adventures in mark making

As this project has led me to experiment with mark making and drawing machines I played around briefly with a hexagonal shaped thing after the fashion of a spirograph... the idea will work it just needs refinement, and a proper design which I may or may not get to for this... we shall see what time brings. a bit of fun noe the less and an excuse to play with hexagons, my favourite shape.

the wire was to hold the pencil in placeas I turned the small hexagon.

 I think it needs solid various sized inner hexagons with holes at various points, like a spirograph and teeth on the outside of them and the inside of the large one.

coming together

I got started cutting all the parts for the final pieces the other day

The laser cutter is brilliant, it does have a mind of its own though and starts cutting wherever it likes, I thought that was pretty funny really.

I used 2 sheets of 3mm laserable plywood from Fred Aldous. Each gear is 2 pieces

So I got all the pieces and have now glued them together so each finished gear is 6mm. 

Lovely stacks of freshly cut gears, I did the design so it would look a little handmade but it does still fit and turn properly.  Now to configure and build the final piece and get on with the next one, the drawing machine.

I made the upright a few days later so that is ready to be put into its base and then get it all tidied up, need to make the little man who will rotate around the outside... and figure out how to do that...

I just measured the centre spaces between the cogs, set up a configuration then drew it centre to centre then widened it

carefully cut it all out on the band saw, not too badly i reckon.

sanded down, painted black and ready to go.

with four weeks to go

A weird week, could not get a grip on things this week and felt like chucking it in more than once but I am sure that is not all that unusual. So Wednesday I was feeling a bit listless and just kind of messed around without really trying to go anywhere serious...I love the organic feel of corrugated cardboard and have been wanting to make something with it for ages so i messed around with some bits and pieces... did some prints and started a colage thing

 I'm not sure where, if anywhere I will go with this yet but it was nice to do.

Then I wanted to further experiment with the drawing device and though maybe a pendulum would work so I made this ( with the help of Kieron of course)  and wanted to tie balloons to it and, you know..see where it went but I didn't go too far with it... still, there's plenty of time for that!

I also made these little doodads,

just to experiment with the action of drawing with something slightly unusual, I was particularly delighted by this piece

http://rustybreak.tumblr.com/post/30466438290/sean-mackaoui

and so used some old pencils to create my versions, test versions.. I will do some nicer ones with coloured pencils where I put specific colours together, groups of say, reds and oranges and yellows.. then one with the blues and greens, that sort of thing.

serendipity

No, not the restaurant where, incidentally, I used to work... a story for another day but the phenomenon.... I swear, during this project I have had many serendipitous moments, well... I will "invent" something or "come up" with an idea only to subsequently discover that it has already been thought of... this is a rather odd thing... yes, I know, we do not live in a vaccuum but really... this latest one is one of the kinetic sculptures I have planned for the FMP and it is essentially a skewiff tower of 7 cogs that are moved by a handle, has a shovel on the bottom as a sort of nod to Duchamp and really just symbolises the futility of so much of our energy expenditure, we are going around in circles etc.... so... then I discover Jean Tinguley fairly recently and today, having finally some time to do a bit of reading and go off on tangets I come across this piece of his

which alomst exactly mirrors the piece I have been working on.. down to the number of cogs, 7.. one for each day of the week...well what can you do!

Other work and experiments

Going along with the theme of low tech machinery and gadgetry, back to the original idea of viewing imagery; I wanted to find a way of showing either a video or slideshow in a low tech way.. so I came across this incredibly simple but functional idea. So I made one and it works, it was an exciting moment.

I just chucked in a paperclip and a bit of blue tac to hold the phone in place and it works a treat.
 So I am thinking of ways to incorporate this into the final presentation...

Also I have been doing a few prints, nothing earth shattering but fun nonetheless.

More experiments with mark making devices

So while I am developing some drawing machines and devices that one must actively participate with I thought hey.... what if I could design something that does not rely on this but only achieves its goal through air displacement? I experimented with suspending various drawing materials from the rafter thingy over my desk

Charcoal, pencil and graphite

  

tied charcoal to a graphite pencil to add weight

What I found here was that the charcoal left a better line, graphite moved better as it was heavier and the pencil just did not join in at all.

Then I tried compressed coloured charcoal and tying weights to the charcoals, putting little flaggy things on the strings to catch the air and all sorts of serious science like that.

I guess the area my desk is does not catch enough air so not much happened.

I just moved the stick back and forth to get marks and see what level of movement was required.... I got this lovely drawing!

aforementioned lovely drawing

 I then thought I had better move the whole thing to a more breezy location so I came up with a contraption and started hanging more drawing things from it.... now at this point the people around me most assuredly questioned my sanity... once again! Oh how I laughed.

 Now, with nothing to catch the air and no real air movement to speak of not a great deal occured here.... I wracked my brains for a full minute and a half and came up with the GENIUS idea of attaching some balloons to the set up... again the sanity questioning occured, again I laughed...

Yes, serious art in progress here. Well... the idea was sound enough but these particular balloons are very dense therefore not really moving around as much as I would have liked. I resolved to buy lighter ones and do this over again the next day.

Lighter ones the next day.

This worked a lot better and more marks were made on the paper. I then moved it by the back door to avail myself of the gale force winds and had a great success!! Once it started raining I thought it would be fun to use watercolour pencils and see what happens there, just need a spray bottle and a fan.....

If you could just see this in motion, ( I will do a video) balloons and charcoals flapping about...you would laugh also.

So this is where I am with this ongoing experiment, lets see what next week brings eh!!

What I have been working on, drawing machines

Well, it has been a while since my last post and update, too long.... but I have been working on a load of stuf, I have been drawn to (pardon the pun) and experimenting with drawing machines. One direction I wanted to take was to to strip the process back to as basic a function as possibleand see what could be achieved with minimal external influence.

I have designed and created a piece I call "Octo-Sketch" (patent pending btw)

and have made up and tested a model of it, it is a load of fun and something I am working on developing further. The idea here is to have multiple participants interacting with the machine all at once. The quality of output is not important, what matters here is how the different participants interact and what sort of interplay comes of it.

I plan to produce it from clear perspex on the laser cutter and present it packaged as a game in a board game box. I wanted to have some fun with this project and this is a good way, I think.

back to work

Between half term, being ill and working I have taken a little break and to be honest it is a good thing, I was worried about getting too obsessed and perhaps a bit overloaded which can happen to me, so a concious step back at this point was necessary. Today I will mostly spend reviewing what I have so far, tidying up some ideas and continuing on a fun new line of reseach into drawing machines. I found a fun video of a turntable spirograph and thought about how fun a drawing machine could be so this is my research and testing for today. It makes sense for this project to be about making images and not just viewing them, I suppose it is the natural progression of the idea.  What I found so far  
Happy to back into it and excited for what I may create. Stay tuned for more contraptions!

.. later that same day....

So I think I would like to definitely use non circular gears for this, oval ones which have variable phasing so all pens move at at different speeds, this could yield some interesting results and these gifs I found ( courtesy of http://stirlingengineforum )  show  how a mechanism could come out looking

I wonder which shapes will work better, although that said they would all work perfectly well just yield different results.
I hope to get at least one working cardboard maquette finished tomorrow, with arms and pencils.
I think this is a much better idea tha a contraption that does not do a great deal of anything, as fun as that would be.. does it really fit the ideas I am working with, I wonder.

Contraption number 2

 So the maquette for my second contraption came out today, this is a 4 cog version ( no point making all 7 or 8, the idea works and besides, it nearly killed my still recovering shoulder), the final will be a freestanding situation,

possibly with6 maybe 7x 20 inch cogs, these are 10 and will be an offset skewiff type thing with the centre cog driven by a handle resembling bike pedals. I thought about mounting it on a shovel or broom or something but that won't work so it would have to be a purpose built "wobbly stick" thing with a broom or shovel head on the bottom.. for a bit of fun.I'm thinking the top one should be the image viewer with the acetates and a projection light but I am not sure, I think really these contraptions should stay as they are.. a bit of purposeless, harmless pedal powered fun.

I like it, I am feeling more confident about the project in general and looking forward to putting these contraptions together as well as working on the others I want to do. I have looked at people like Arthur Ganson's contraptions and some Rube Goldberg machines for inspiration, well I say that but I have already been making these and then came across this stuff, great to make and I hope, fun in an exhibition setting.

contraption number 1

Today I was able to get a first maquette done so am now more easily able to plan out my gadgets and contraptions, these hopefully will be done on the laser cutter with wood and painted. I'd like to make it look a little funky so the cogs are like rotary phone dials and you intuitively go up and start dialling it.. now I am still undecided as to whether or not it will serve a purpose, I think this one I think will not though. It is a combo of inspirations from Metropollis and Duchamp's Disks Bearing Spirals, I want the whimsical side, the piece for the sake of it, if it makes you smile it has worked. I enjoy watching the cogs go round and am really looking forward to building the real deals. I also feel a lot better about the brief in general, less stuck, floating and wandering, more focused so full steam ahead eh...there is  plenty of design work to go but at least the ideas will work, stay tuned for more mad machinery and weird artwork!