People often ask where David gets his ideas and it can be a lengthy question to answer. Everything in life is an inspiration to an artist; it just may take a while for it to come to fruition in a creative work. Today, David is introducing his latest kinetic sculpture, Swoop and the original idea for this piece came from an 8mm Howdy Doody video from his childhood. David shares more about the origin and provides a link to the actual movie (now up on YouTube thanks possibly to someone else that loved it as a child as well) at the actual sculpture page here.
Swoop Technical Details:
Limited Edition of 95
Size: 29"h x 23"w x 5"d
Power Source: Constant Force Spring
Run Time: Approximateely 10 hours per winding
This piece is the combination of two new leaps David has recently made in mechanism design. Previously, his mechanisms always gave a power push through a minimum of 120 degrees. He needed to reduce the angle in order to give many small pushes verses one big push. To get the impact of the swoop motion he needed the smaller pushes. Swoop pushes through an angle of 60 degrees. He combined that new mechanism with a technique to have the front wheel move in an opposing direction without having a drive belt running directly in front of it. Those two "discoveries" allowed him to finally create the Swoop motion he remembered from the Howdy Doody film.
The Swoop mechanism works well in a smaller scale. So much kinetic sculpture is large scale and not appropriate for personal ownership. David has always tried to create sculptures that can fit in the homes. Swoop does that a bit more easily than some of his recent works.
Swoop links:
