Project 1: Robot Petting Zoo Plans. . .
The process of getting people to touch the sculptures, so the sculptures will do something. This article is for a class, so it will change as I add to it.
Sketch 1. Long Distance Touching: An Hydraulic feeling device. Someone can push on one of the hydraulic boxes- and following the tubes going a distance- the hydraulic box on the other side pushes out. If two people, each with one hand on a box pushed back and forth simultaneously, then they will feel each other pushing simultaneously. If only one person is pushing, then the other side will have a ghost of the push, which, because of its hydraulic nature, will eventually return to flat, non impression mode. There’s gold glitter in the water, the kind that doesn’t rust, so people can see the water move back and forth. The box is made out of pink glass looking acrylic, and the covering over the tubes a clear vinyl.
Inspiration for Long Distance Touching: I worked on a walk up volunteer run exhibit called Hydro Puppets at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Aside from the real exhibit, I wanted to play with the push and pull of the Master and the Slave (real engineering terms). I rigged up this syringe to a long 12 foot tube, filled it with water, then put another syringe on the other end. Then I held one syringe, and had someone go around the wall and hold the other. From there we “fought” each other. It was funny. I pushed, he pushed harder, I could feel him release, I pulled. It felt very personal, like he was personally pushing me, even though he really wasn’t. We were puppets to each other. Also, artist Claudia Schmacke uses similar materials.
Sketch 2. Feather Frond: So this pattern is meant to be made from laser cutting leather or a synthetic polyester fabric. Ideally, would be great if the poly fabric could be double layered in the cutter, and the cutting of the fabric would weld the layers together. Maybe pneumatic. The air fills the pockets and inflates a wilt-y looking feather, the air pushes out and it looks wilt-y again. OR, muscle wire to the leather version of this, and get the fingers to contract. Use gravity to straighten it out. To activate, use an air filled syringe, or have an air pump touch activated, or maybe designate an area for touching, and use semi conductors/resistance sensors, and program a response for the muscle wire.
Inspiration for Feather Frond: MIT’s Tangible Media Group have created aeroMorph, an inflatable like moving device. Their example shows a self folding origami crane. I’m sure theirs requires some kind of air compressor or pump, which is loud.
Sketch 3. Grape Links: This is just a pattern that I think would be cool to try and twist together in order to decorate a moving piece. The grape parts can hook onto each other, and if twisted, will make a petal like design. This is just one of many decorative patterns that could be combined to create a larger, plant/coral looking landscape.
All these patterns will connect, and work with each other when a person touches something.
Inspiration: Tim Hawkinson’s installation
Sketch 4. Fiddlehead: This is another inflatable like pattern. If not inflatable, then muscle wire would be the way that it would move, using gravity as a way to straighten it out. Also, I like how an elephant trunk is straight, and can curl up. So using the notches in the material as a natural way of bending the material.
Inspiration for Fiddlehead: An image of one!
Sketch 5. Coral Cuffs: A pattern based coral like appendage. The end parts come together and riveted to form a tube with spikes on either side. This pattern I have done before, and it has a nice bend-ability. Would be great to make an assortment of pattern like appendages that could be activated by touch. Maybe this is filled with an inflatable too?
Inspiration for Coral Cuffs: An example of one I made previously. Inspiration for this came from Sophia Vyzoviti’s book Soft Shells: Porous and Deployable Architectural Screens
Part 2 of the process: I’ve decided to start with the Long Distance Touching idea, because it keeps calling me. The more I talk to people about it, I realize not only do they understand it, they really get into it. So the idea is sold. I have changed the shape of the box to a hand shape. That way I don’t have to put up signs that say “do this” because the hand shape will be the indicator of what should be done, and how someone should “touch” the sculpture. That type of stuff seems to work at the Science Museum of Minnesota, so I’ll try it here. I just got 100 6ml syringes, and placing an order for the city block of tubing I need to get to make this project happen. The acrylic sheet for the boxes I have, and got it from a Choice Plastics run I did a couple months ago. I’ve been working with Choice Plastics, a plastics broker in MN. They buy post industrial plastic that would normally go to a dump, and grind it up, then sell it to the industry. I have permission to walk through their towers of scraps before it’s ground down, and choose stuff that would cost me $1000s of dollars, but I get it for free. Also, once I’m done with something, I give it back to them to be recycled. Did you know that acrylic is not recycled (very little) in the US? It’s too toxic, and the only country that will take it is China, where they melt it down and release toxins into the atmosphere which lands into ocean. For laser cutting, acrylic is a standard. For the product industry, acrylic is used all the time. Why do we make this stuff? This stuff should be banned! Why am I using it in my project then? Aesthetics. And that’s why that stuff is still here. I am sorry planet for using acrylic, I know I am wrong but I keep doing it anyway because it looks awesome.
Getting Started with Long Distance Touching.
I have decided go with Long Distance Touching as my first project. To make the hand shape you can see that I traced my own hand with a little room around it.
I then realized a few things. At first I was going to just place the syringes in a grid like pattern on the hand. I turned a syringe around to the biggest part that would need to fit on the hand plates, and found that I would need to customize, or cut off parts of the syringe in order to make sure as many could fit on the hand at once. Then I found that if I put the syringes in a grid pattern, some of the fingers wouldn’t get a syringe. So I spent hours puzzling the best position for the syringes in order to get the maximum contact for the hand.
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Below is an image of the placing I had to do in order to fit as many syringes on the hand plate as possible. I don’t know what this part is called. It’s where the two fingers, pointer and middle would hold so the thumb can push the plunger. Let’s call it the “finger hold.” Since I will be working in 1/4" acrylic sheet, I don’t want to be creating a fragile swiss cheese hand plate. If I secured each syringe with two bolts, not only would I need tons of tiny hardware, I would also be creating tons of work for myself drilling each syringe finger hold and then screwing them in. As mentioned earlier, that many tiny holes would make the hand sheet more fragile. So my idea was to “sandwich” the finger holds between two similar cut pieces. When everything is bolted together, the syringes would be held in place. So then the only additional holes I would need to make would be for the long bolts holding all the hand plates together.
This next image is the master and slave syringes in action. I would rather call this the hydraulic unit. I’ve decided with testing that 15 feet of tubing would separate the hands from each other. Far enough where an individual cannot operate both, close enough to see what the other person is up to. At first I was going to use glitter to highlight the flow of water within the tubing, but after testing the hydraulic unit in public, people commented that the movement was magical when the water was clear.
Now onto getting the files into the computer. I scanned my hand drawing then traced it in Illustrator. The syringe holes were easy, I just made those in Illustrator because my drawing was just for reference for those. That part was great because I could dial it in to the exact width for the syringes. As you can see in the image there are extra small holes, and there are three hands, one of them with smaller syringe holes.
Here is the Illustrator file. The tiny holes are for the main bolt hardware that will sandwich in order: top hand plate, syringes, medium hand plate, syringe cylinders, bottom hand plate. The top and medium hand plates are the same. The bottom hand plate has the smaller syringe holes so that the cylinders can rest on them, and the nozzle can poke out the hole for the tubing.
I cut out the three hand plates out of clear 1/4" acrylic and noticed right away that the tiny bolt holes were too tiny and also too close to the edge. I put the syringes in just to see how everything else worked, and it was fine (or so I hoped).
I made my modifications in Illustrator, and was ready to cut into my brand new amber acrylic.
At our lab we have an older laser cutter. The lab techs have to up the power on the laser almost 4x the normal power to make sure it can cut through 1/4". This wasn’t always the case. It also makes for some errors. Here is an image of the amber acrylic with chips by the holes. This is because after 3 passes 4x the power, it still didn’t cut all the way through, and in order to extract the circles, I had to pound them out with a hammer and screwdriver on a cushion. This didn’t happen to all of them, just to random areas. I decided to work with the chipped hand plates anyway and practiced assembling all the layers together to make sure everything was okay. I had a feeling there would need to be another cut. At this point I have only worked on one hand unit or hand sandwich. There will be two, but I’m trying to get the first one right before I go ahead and do the second.
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This image shows the syringes placed in the middle hand plate. The top plate will go on top. Then the plungers go through the top plate into the syringes.
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The next image shows the bottom plate on, and the tubing being inserted. This is where I found another mistake. The holes for the tubing are supposed to be exact and snug to keep them in place. They are too snug. I can put the tubing on, but not after tremendous effort, and there are about 60 syringes that need tubing on one hand. I have to do that twice- the ends go to the other hand. So I assembled it all anyway, and I used a smaller tube as an adaptor to reach the nozzle inside the hole, just so I can see if it worked. I did this for one syringe set. It takes almost two cups of water for each 15 foot syringe. That gave me some serious insight on how much this will end up weighing. Almost 8 gallons, which is about 66 pounds. Which goes back to the hardware, and how am I going to secure this to the wall, as well as the tubing so that 8 gallons doesn’t pull my sculpture down. Also 8 gallons is a lot of water. I will need to use some plumbers putty around each connection to insure there aren’t too many leaks.
This is the hand sandwich assembled with long Q-tips and nuts on the back. This is the temporary assembly. I needed to see how it all looked. Now that I see it all together there are a couple things I want to change. First, I made four layers. I am going to keep it to three. The top hand place I am going to keep orange. The middle and bottom I am going to make clear. All the bolt holes need to be bigger, and as mentioned, the bottom hand plate needs to have bigger holes for the tubing. I am going to use clear acorn nuts instead of metal nuts, and instead of amber tubing, I will use the clear tubing. I also need to design a back plate with holes for screwing into the wall, that the hand sandwich also attaches to. This image of the Illustrator file shows the adjustments I have made in order to go to the next step of my project.