After many months of delay I finally built the first prototype of "Evolution" a month or so ago. It has made it from the studio, where I tweaked it for a few weeks, to our dining room so I can live with it in a nice environment as I continue the testing.
The sculpture works as I had hoped it would. The patterning is quite dramatic and very different from any of my previous work. The animation above captures the essence of the motion and patterns but not the full length or complexity of a cycle from spring push to spring push, usually around 3 minutes. The wheels move quite slowly toward the end of the cycle creating some of my favorite patterns. The relatively large mass off the wood wheels allows for this slow motion while still storing enough energy to trigger the spring mechanism. The cycle times and patterns are not regular. They vary depending on the speed and direction the wheels are moving relative to each other when the spring push occurs. I'll put up a video soon.
Marji thought of the name "Evolution" for this sculpture because of my series of blog posts describing the process of designing this piece. The series starts at this link. I plan to keep testing the Evolution for a few weeks and hopefully make a test production run next month.