Evolution of a Kinetic Sculpture - It works!

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.

Why Quandary was a quandary.

My favorite sculptures are the ones that frustrate and challenge me. Quandary has that quality. I've lived with this piece for a long time.

I arrived at the patterning concept fairly early in the design process. I started with the idea of 4 overlapping satellite wheels composed primarily of nearly straight lines I added the circles for balance and I was pleased with the result.

Finding the right mechanism to move the patterning mechanism proved to be much more of a challenge.

The first mechanism I played with was a version of the 2 arm mechanism I've used in sculptures like the Variation series. I never built the mechanism. I didn't like how it looked with the patterning assembly.

I liked the symmetry of the next mechanism. It was based on an old mechanism design I hadn't used in years and thought deserved some new attention. I built this mechanism and it worked pretty much as shown in the animation. There were a few problems. Visually it was too big and complex for the patterning portion of the sculpture. All the complexity also reduced the run time to far less than I had expected. It was also difficult to set up and string.

 I didn't give up easily. I set the sculpture up in our home and over a period of many months I tweaked the mechanism design and started playing with the patterning design. I found that by rearranging the satellite wheels I could create different patterns. This drew me on. I tried a number of different arrangements both in animations and on the model itself but in the end I just wasn't happy with the sculpture. I could see something was there but I couldn't find it.

 I finally decided to junk the complex mechanism and all the patterning variations and try something very simple. I call the mechanism concept my "fall back" mechanism because it relies on the fact that an off balance wheel will fall back and swing like a pendulum when it looses momentum. I've used this concept in pieces as varied as Matrix, Harmony and Sun Dance.

I had doubts that the mechanism would work with this fairly heavy patterning assembly but there was only one way to find out. In fact it didn't work when I first tried it. I had to play with the balance and add some swing to the satellite wheels to keep it from stalling but with this simplification the sculpture came together. The subtle swinging motion added interest to the pattern as did the irregular start and stop of the motion assembly. The smaller mechanism brought focus back to the patterning part of the sculpture. To top it all off it ran for more than 10 hours and was simple to set up!

 I learned a lot in designing Quandary that I will apply to future sculptures. Both of the initial mechanisms still intrigue me and there is a lot more exploring to be done with angle and arrangement of satellite patterning wheels in designs with 3, 4 and 6 satellites. I have no idea where it will lead me but I'm looking forward to finding out!

Designing Fiesta kinetic sculpture

I recently introduced my Fiesta kinetic sculpture edition. This is the circuitous story of its design.

I learned a lot while designing my sculpture Journey, mainly about how the relative mass of one wheel influences the motion of the entire sculpture. This started me wondering how I could use this in an optical patterning sculpture. Would it be effective to have the wheels creating an optical pattern while also swinging and orbiting together?

I started with the basic Journey mechanism but modified it to use wheels with many curved spokes. I knew I needed the front wheel to have a mass similar to the entire carrying mechanism so I doubled the wheel by laying one on top of the other. Having this many spokes all dark or all light was too much of a good thing so I tried one dark and one light. When combined with a dark back wheel this created a new pattern that I found quite exciting. I was beginning to think this might work. I worked up a full animation of how I thought it would look when all running together. I liked what I saw.

I took my drawings to the shop and made the sculpture. I've learned to be patient and make the entire sculpture through finishing. In my younger years I'd be be so anxious to see it actually work I'd skip steps just to get it done. I found that this usually took longer. I'd have problems getting the sculpture to work because in my haste I had made some silly mistake.

This time the sculpture worked in that it moved correctly but it did not create the patterning I had seen in the animation. The patterning was there but not with the frequency and strength I was looking for. I lived with the prototype for several months trying different tweaks but it just wasn't doing what I wanted it to do. Back to the drawing board.

I was hooked on the dark/light/dark patterning. This was something new and I wanted to explore it further. The best mechanism for this was the one I originally designed for Meander but have subsequently used in Phoenix and Radiance. It turns the two wheels in opposite directions but independently so that the patterning shifts with time. A limitation of this mechanism is that the front wheel has to be fairly massive to trip the mechanism. Radiance and Phoenix have large wheels so this isn't a problem but wheels the size I had used in Pinwheel would not normally work well. The fact that this wheel was actually two wheels together so had twice the mass, this might be a perfect fit. Why hadn't I thought of it before?

It took several days of drawing to come up with the actual design of Fiesta. You'd think that knowing the mechanism and the pattering wheels would make it easy but in this case it took quite a while to come together.

In the end I'm very pleased with the result but as usual the path getting there was not a straight one!

Part 13 - Where do sculpture ideas come from?

I've been refining the design I put up in Part 12 with the idea of making a prototype. I like the general motion and pattern but I find the "flash" when the outside forms overlay each other distracting. I tried several different methods to get around this and finally found a very simple solution. I simply made the outside rings on the front wheel slightly larger than those on the back wheel. Now, rather than flashing, the two forms seem to flow into each other. I also gave the outer rings a little more form by thickening the center parts of each ring part.

Part 12 - Where do sculpture ideas come from?

I like what is happening in the center of the wheels wheels in part 11. In order to bring even more attention to this area I added more spokes and changed the inner arcs. The collapsing "star" inside of the expanding arcs is the mix of patterns that I have been looking for.

Now it is time to stop playing and get to work trying to translate these drawings and animations to wood and then building a spring driven mechanism that will move them.

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To continue to part 13: Click Here