For the Love of Blog

Chei-Wei and I worked together on this one. We cut out two big round pieces of Plexi for the wheels and mounted the trap that was pulling a string on a rod in between.

Video here

We lost but we did cross the finish line!

Adi and I put together the crane and the amusement park ride thing:

Mike, Xiaoyang, Cynthia and I worked together on this one. After brainstorming for a while we knew we wanted something in the chain triggered by solar power. To crack the egg, at first we thought of a motor and a nail at the end that turns and smashes the egg, and we worked on turning circular motion into linear motion. But it was too messy and we couldn’t supply the motor with enough power to turn the cracking mechanism. So we thought, could we puncture the egg shell, make a tiny hole in it, and just suck it all out? That’s when we came up with the syringe idea. Xiaoyang was really innovative here coming up with a way to have the syringe puncture the egg using the tension of rubber bands. The rest of the steps we sort of just improvised on, each of us building some part.

Video here

An indoor sculpture that displays current weather conditions

For this assignment I chose to use footage I shot of the same *girl* in 3 different locations. The footage not only gives the viewer an idea,  or clue as to who this character is but also of the person who is shooting her and the relationship they have. She is, of course, the main subject, but she is also encouraged by the camera to either repeat her actions or to continue exploring them. What I found interesting is how the character is so in tune with her surroundings, and how distinctive her actions are in each of the videos, so much so, that some in class weren’t sure if she was the same person.

Her mood also sets the tone in each video. In the lake she is quiet, concentrating on rowing, very peaceful. In the desert she’s a bit crazy, perhaps from the heat, perhaps she’s inspired by what she saw, but definitly happy. And in the house she’s mad. She’s taking out the garbage, looking at her dirty dishes, and does not want to be filmed.

Mother and her Children

I wanted to literally depict a frame out of a comic book. I sculpted a mother giving birth to a baby while all her other babies surround her, interacting with each other, playing, pooing, sucking on their mother’s toes.

For inspiration I flipped through some of my favorite comic books, most notably Johnny Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix. In one of them there’s a drawing of a woman on a hospital bed giving birth, screaming at the startled doctor that she’s changed her mind and that she wants an abortion. So I sculpted the mother. and then made the rest of the babies. For me it was an exercise in sculpting an “action” scene.

Marina noted that it’s like a New Yorker caption gone bad, which is more or less how I see it too. It was nice to see everyone leaning close to look at the babies and discovering their different facial expressions. It seemed joyful. One question that came up was why I chose to work in that size (the babies are tiny). I didn’t really think about it when I was doing it. I think I unconsciously chose that size -  it’s make them much cuter and it’s an easier process.

I chose to do simple logging of switch data. I had 2 switches, each acting as a counter and every 2 minutes the Arduino would log the data to sensorbase.org

sensorbase

For the pong game, I made a simple controller, with 2 switches for left and right and all the LEDs showing connection status, right and left LEDs, etc… very similar to the one in the book. I mounted everything in a plastic container and was going to use 2 loafs of bread as the left and right controllers by just putting them over the switches. Unfortunately, I ate my project after being frustrated in class because my XPort wouldn’t connect to the Ethernet. Turns out that the Router was shitty and Tom plugged me into a different one so I was able to demonstrate that it works.