Reuben Margolin – Kinetic Sculpture Inspiration

Suspended wave

I want to produce something almost similar to this wave form. But rather out of a solid continuous sheet with pre-folded lines within it similar to my paper forms. The mechanism that would drive the sculpture would have some sort of randomising movement capabilities so that every time it moves different lines in the pre-folded pattern would rise up and sink down under contraction or stretching. This would hopefully produce a constantly changing sheet form moving in and out of 2-D to 3-D and back again in hopefully a massive amount of variations. What material I would use needs investigating. I have a long way to go before realising this idea.

Little Bowls in Large Sheets and Bowl Body Jewellery – Craft?

Experimenting with the copper bowls I have produced for my craft object. My original intention was to explore form through jewellery fold-forms: sheet metal to 3-D form, I have ended up producing lots of small copper bowls which have not been used to realise an object. Playing with these little copper bowls Iv become interested with their relationship in direct contact with the body, creating an almost scaly or coral like appearance, perhaps blistering skin.

I am interested in how all these little bowls would behave attached (somehow) in a sheet and what forms could be produced from that. Some sort of elastic mesh would make them ware-able on the body where the individual bowls could shift move and flex with the muscle underneath. Or a large sheet of little copper bowls could be used to produce a static sculptural piece of work that could be made into a light or some such thing. Is this Craft? 

Stop Motion Animation Experimentation – with Monkey Jam

After doing some research online I found a simple bit of free stop motion animation software called Monkey Jam. Initially I ran into a few problems with the software (like it must be only program running and not being able to set movie image size before rendering) which Iv outlined in my reflective journal. And even though it is a simple enough program to use it took some time getting used to.

I have posted a few of my experiments with the Frames Per Second (FPS). If I decide to produce a quality piece of stop motion animation work it will be important to understand the effects of different speeds of FPS to achieve the effect I want.

I also discovered I need to make a standpoint for the camera or invest in a tripod.

Laser Cutting Gears

Experiments in laser cutting gears using foam board. Foam board seems to work well for quick experiments. Here we were concerned with the gear placement within the digital file, this was to do with whether the gear mechanism should be exploded or can be left touching before exporting the file to be cut. Both worked very well, we ended up with 3 sets of perfectly consistent gears with no difference between touching and non-touching.

After this initial experiment what is now needed is to design and test some simple mechanisms that will stretch and contract a sheet material.