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when the Sun is out
We have had some wonderfully clear autumn days in Melbourne. Long sunny days are perfect for the work, with the sun staying consistently on the target mirrors and finding its path all the way to the back space. The light has lost much of its heat by the time it reaches the back space of…
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keeping track of the Sun
As mentioned previously, I’ve built my tracking mirrors on top of stripped down moving head lights. These mirrors follow the sun across the sky, reflecting the suns light onto a static mirror (what I am calling a target mirror) located in ACCA’s foyer. When installed at ACCA they hang off the side of the building like…
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it’s too darn hot
I’ve been testing the moving mirror mechanism on the roof of my studio. I have it shining through the window and hitting a piece of masking tape I’ve stuck on the wall. It can hold this position for a number of hours, but then things go awry. It seems to be resetting itself. On investigation,…
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solar balloons
I think I just found the solution to what happens when the sunlight reaches the end of its path. Solar hot air balloons. I’ve been looking at these online but hadn’t got around to making one – I’m so glad I just did. They are beautiful.
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fifty-one degrees
This morning I focused all four mirrors on the one spot. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect – spontaneous combustion maybe. It wasn’t quite that dramatic, the temperature reached fifty-one degrees.
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going a little crazy
I’m making a master control box for the moving mirrors. This will allow me to turn them on and off individually. The control box will sit upstairs in Chunky Move’s plant room. While installing the switches I lost one of the rear mounting washers. As a result the middle switch sits slightly higher then the…
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I’m just holding up a mirror
I’m contemplating titles for the work. So far I have the following: New Millennium Fountain Karen’s favourite is: I’m just holding up a mirror. The title is inspired by Spiro but I don’t think either of them are serious.
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brain box
I’m putting the control circuitry for the moving mirrors into an aluminium box, to be mounted next to the moving head mechanism. It’s a tight fit but I am happy with how it is coming together. The Arduino Pro Mini controllers are mounted on header sockets so they can be removed if needed. The…
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making progress
I’ve decided to make 5 moving mirror units instead of 6. This will save me quite a bit of time and means I have some spare parts – just in case.
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my production line
I’m making 6 moving head mirror units. While 6 is not a huge number it really gives the project a production line feel – every time I make a modification to the design I have to repeat the process 5 more times. Not to mention the 30 (or more) fixed mirror supports that still need…
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wireless communication
I have to work out how to get a moving mirror to reflect sunlight onto a static target mirror. Rather than calculate where the sun will be at a particular moment in time and then adjusting the mirrors position to suit, I have decided to set up a feedback loop. The target mirror will talk…
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solar forge
Whenever I get on the internet to research this project I tend to end up at a project like this. The Solar Forge by Tom Riley. There are no shortage of DIY solar collectors on the internet and there is definitely something exciting about watching a piece of 2 by 4 spontaneously burst into flames. I’m…
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static mirror mounts
There are going to be a lot of mirrors in this work, maybe as many as 50, and each mirror will need to be adjusted and fixed at a specific angle. I’ve started making support structures for these static mirrors. They look like this – ply and MDF. I made 13 of these yesterday –…
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moving mirror mount
I’ve decided to use plywood to mount the mirrors to the moving heads. This should be waterproof (at least for the 2 month duration of NEW13) and fits well with the DIY aesthetic that is developing in the project. The face is counter balanced with pieces of steel plate.
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going pro
If I’m going to mount moving mirrors on the outside of ACCA then my dinky ply construction (from a previous post) just ain’t going to cut it. I need some more serious tech. Andrew gave me this moving head light to experiment with. This thing is solid – pan and tilt movement, good bearings, mostly…
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sun in ACCA
While ACCA gives a good impression of being completely windowless there are a few places where light enters the building. I set up cameras and took some time-lapse video. This video shows the sun moving through the kitchen space at ACCA. It was filmed on 14th January from 9:00am to 3:15pm. There is direct…
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making a moving mirror
I’ve started work on a mechanism that will move a mirror to track the sun. There wasn’t much planning, I just made it up as I went. The mechanical parts were salvaged from an old daisy wheel printer – the rest is plywood.
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ACCA’s roof
Today I toured ACCA’s roof. It’s quite a confusing space, with a lot of plant. This is the west end (front). This is the east end (back). The wall provides an edge around the roof perimeter. The height varies between about 300mm to 3m. Many of the screws in the wall capping are loose –…
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the Crosley/Hallstrom IcyBall
I’ve been trying to decide what to do with the sunlight I plan to collect. While searching for inspiration I came across the IcyBall, an early refrigeration unit that is powered by heat. (image from Crosley Automobile Club) This ingenious device was developed simultaneously in North America and Australia and sold during the 1920s and…
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my sun machine
While the thought of power tools screaming full-tilt across the ACCA forecourt is compelling, the challenge of bringing light into the gallery has begun to capture my imagination. There is a beautiful work by Olafur Eliasson called Your Sun Machine where Eliasson removes a circular section of the gallery roof and allows the sun (and presumably other…
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power tool drag racing
I’ve started work on NEW13. Which means, I’ve started thinking about it – multiple, divergent, thoughts. There are two main (and seemingly unrelated) themes emerging: 1. something to do with sunlight and 2. a community event such as power tool drag racing. (image from Baltimore Node Hackerspace).
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new. again
In 2001 I was in Primavera at the MCA. I was 30, not exactly a spring vegetable but well within the ’35 years and under’ tag line the MCA use to promote the exhibition. Now, 11 years later at the age of 42, I’ve been asked by Charlotte Day (associate curator at ACCA) to be…
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the world builds itself
Self folding origami from Harvard University and M.I.T. and Self-Assembling 3D Shapes from Brown and Johns Hopkins Universities.
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…and all of a sudden I was in love with the world.
via Diamond Standard
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Rudd’s Downfall
I’m really enjoying the ‘Downfall’ parodies (and the surrounding drama, and the parodies of the drama).
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time to trade-in the flying monkeys
MikroKopter – HexaKopter from Holger Buss.
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Toast Gearbox
by Amelia (a Cloud Farm experiment).
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Steve Jobs Cheese Head
via the cooks den
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there i fixed it
I’ve been around the DIY / hacking world for a while now, thought I knew the field, but this site is amazing.
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Butter Ball
I was in Istanbul recently, which was great; the Hagia Sophia, the Basilica Cistern, the Spice Bazaar, wonderful friends, and this incredible butter ball. thanks to Glenn for the photo.
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Electric Dream Car 123 version 2
I’ve blogged about this amazing vehicle before, but it’s worth revisiting because Greg Zanis and sons have made some progress. The Dream Car 123 now has GOLD TRIM, neon lighting and 80 lead-acid batteries, while retaining the original pyramid form factor, single person occupancy, and bullet proof Plexiglas. Greg has a new video and is looking for…
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Bees have Face Recognition
Last week I was stung on the face by a bee. Sadly, the bee died. I am still going strong. Image credit: Robert W. Matthews, University of Georgia, Bugwood.org Had the bee survived, and had I given it some kind of sugary reward, then according to scientists at the Université de Toulouse, it would have remembered…
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Queue Reality Distortion Field!
Apple giveth a new toy for dicking about with.
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Meet ‘The Back-Up’ shotgun rack
“enabling access to your shotgun while in the lying position in your bed”. Yes folks, it’s real. The theme here is obviously home defence, but I guess if you can’t live with the fear any longer, your gun is also conveniently located for a suicide attempt.
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Dog Restrainer
c. 1940 from LIFE Magazine’s ‘30 Dumb Inventions‘
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Mobile Phone Radiation Used To Treat Alzheimer’s Disease (in mice)
As links between mobile phone usage and brain tumours become more evident there is some good news, mobile phones may also enhance your memory and prevent the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Via LiveScience
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Freeze-Wait-Reanimate
Yesterday was the 43rd anniversary of the death and subsequent freezing of Dr. Bedford – the worlds first successful cryogenics patient (successful in the fact that he is still frozen and, unfortunately, also still dead). Quoting from the 1967 issue of Freeze-Wait-Reanimate, there may be some hope for reanimation in the distant future when reanimation techniques have…
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The Age Online Is A Horrible Publication
Breaking News from The Age: But don’t just take my word for it. (ed. 15th Jan. Link now broken – or fixed, depends on your point of view) Via Backstoryesque
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Space Elevator II
Tomás Saraceno, Space Elevator II (working title), 2009. © Tomás Saraceno Via we-make-money-not-art
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LOL (LOL)
Confused? over 30? see Rocketboom
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David Harvey on the right to the city.
David Harvey speaks about ‘the right to reshape the city in a different image’. He presents the city as a manifestation of our heart’s desire; ‘In remaking the city we remake ourselves. The question of what kind of city do we want cannot be divorced from questions about what kind of people do we want to…
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1950’s Italian Police on Motorbikes
via Alternative Displays.
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Some amazing web sites
I’m working on a new project (soon to be added to the main site). It involves some rather challenging web design, so I’ve been doing research – and in my travels I found this gem with the following company logo-thingy. I also found a pretty impressive site on miniature donkeys with an amazing ‘Lake applet effect’…
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Out-of-body Lung Repair
Developed at the Toronto General Hospital. via
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Plan B
My plan to turn the Brunswick Secondary College maintenance shed into a GIANT smoke ring generator has failed – not the slightest hint of a smoke ring formed at the 2m diameter hole we (the year 7’s and myself) constructed at the end of the 5m long shed. And so, despite my best intentions, the…
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Sheep, is there anything they can’t do?
thanks to Simon for the link.
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Smoke Rings
I’ve been making smoke ring generators with students from Brunswick Secondary College. They are based on the one below. I was talking with the kids today about making a huge smoke ring machine, maybe using the maintenance shed for the ‘tub’. YouTube offered this up for inspiration.
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Today in class…
a student showed us: Times like this I struggle with the whole ‘duty of care’ concept.
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Big Dog (Human)
Continuing in the theme of humans-imitating-technology, I present these two videos from Rory.
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A gift from Youtube
via Scott (and at the risk of becoming a mirror of his blog), I pass on this goodness. Get the backstory here, or simply continue with your day happy in the knowledge that such things exist.
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Peep Jousting
A personal favourite.
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A change has come.
I got this from Super Colossal but I’m so blown away by it I had to re-post. The robots.txt file for whitehouse.gov has changed. Yesterday it was: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /search Disallow: /query.html Disallow: /omb/search Disallow: /omb/query.html Disallow: /expectmore/search Disallow: /expectmore/query.html Disallow: /results/search Disallow: /results/query.html Disallow: /earmarks/search Disallow: /earmarks/query.html Disallow: /help Disallow:…
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Getting out of Quartz Composer
Last time I looked Quartz Composer wouldn’t talk to anything, so I find this project from Jay pretty amazing. It’s using the open source Peggy LED board from Evil Mad Science and the Arduino (also open source). More videos here, and Jay is sharing his code here.
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It’s a MacWorld
By all accounts it’s been another stunning MacWorld despite the absence of Steve Jobs. The highlight for me was the announcement of ‘variable pricing’ for songs on the iTunes music store – simply amazing, what will they think of next? Still, not quite as amazing as last year: or the year before: thanks Rory
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Steve for CTO?
There is an absurd rumour floating around that Steve Jobs is going to be offered the soon-to-be-created position of Chief Technology Officer in Obama’s cabinet. As Dr. Macenstein points out, there are about 600,000 fat, Dorito-covered IT guys holed up in server closets across the country that are more qualified for the job. Clearly a stupid idea, will never…
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Chicken Technology
asimo is of course stabilised by chickens. (thanks to Scott)
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asimo runs and brings you coffee
Rory sent me this a while ago.
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Get a Job.
The best job description I’ve ever read is currently up on Super Colossal. If only I was an architect. oh yeah, and a youth.
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Chemical Party
an EU teen initiative (music is “Der Fledermaus Can’t Get It” performed by Von Sudenfed).
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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, all the Ewoks died
“Endor is a depopulated wasteland” and I’ve got to say that really makes my day. (Although I should mention the title for this post is a little misleading. Not all Ewoks were on Endor when the moon was destroyed and so it is conceivable that a small population of the fuzzy little fucks survived off-world. – regrettable, I know,…
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Van de Graaff
More High-Voltage science action. These Van de Graaff Generators were built by Robert J. Van de Graaff himself for MIT in the early 1930’s. Unlike the Tesla Coil, the Van de Graaff generator is an electrostatic machine which uses a moving belt to accumulate electrostatic voltages on a hollow metal sphere. The machines above were capable of producing 5,000,000 volts and were designed to accelerate…
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Counterweight
I just watched a very interesting architecture documentary (Great Expectations, SBS). Among the diverse array of incredible buildings was this beautifully simple counterweight by architect Antti Lovag.
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Nazi Flying Saucers
While walking on the wild high voltage side of science I came across this: a German Haunebu 2, on a test flight. Wow. Unbelievable. If it wasn’t for that authentic looking signature…
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Death Ray
I just fell down the rabbit hole that is Nikola Tesla; inventor of radio, AC current distribution, remote controlled vehicles, and the DEATH RAY (actually Tesla called it the “Peace Ray” but that didn’t catch on). There’s a bit of controversy about whether it actually existed, most sane people think not, most nut bags with an internet connection and…
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another Radiohead remake
If you’ve seen the Radiohead video for House of Cards you probably know it was ‘filmed’ using a collection of 3D laser scanners. What you may not know is that Radiohead have released the scan data and Processing code used to produce the video. What would anyone want with that? Well you could use it…
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Electric Dream Car 123
and it’s clad in bullet-proof half-inch plexi-glass. I’m speechless. Link.
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Clean Coal
from freeloveforum.
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E.A.T.
I was googling E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology when I came across this collaboration for the Expo ’70 Pepsi Pavilion in Osaka, Japan. The outside of the building was covered by a water vapour cloud sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya. The dome shaped objects in the foreground are six-foot high moving sculptures by Robert…
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Corporate Cannibal
Grace Jones has a new video. Steven Shaviro reflects on the video, gender, race, and capitalism and explains why Jones is such a compelling figure.
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Western Spaghetti
from PES.
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Wallpaper for new iPhone owners
from John Young.
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Curitiba, Brazil
I just listened to an interview with Jaime Lerner (transcript here), president of the International Union of Architects and 3 time mayor of Curitiba. He has many insightful things to say about cities as instruments for change. What struck me, in our current climate of 2020 and 2030 plans, was his three principles for change: keep it simple,…
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NARCOA
Sometimes using the internet feels a bit like that movie cliché where a black van pulls up and a character gets dumped out onto the pavement. Your dazed, you have no idea how you got there, yet things seem vaguely familiar. It was like that today when I found myself on the North American Railcar Operators…
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Dr. Horrible’s sing-along blog
Joss Whedon (writer/creator/director of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, etc.) has a new three part web-based musical mini series. Act I, II, and III are now available! Light, funny (via laughing squid).
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John Seely Brown
John Seely Brown was Chief Scientist at Xerox for many years and the Director of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1990 – 2000. Some amazing stuff came out of PARC, including the Macintosh personal computer – John has something to say on that towards the end of this video. It’s a long video (almost…
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Big Ideas (don’t get any)
Simon sent me a link to this video. It’s by Glasgow School of Art graduate James Houston, set to the Radiohead tune Nude. The nostalgic tragedy of Radiohead seems to couple perfectly with the Sinclair ZX spectrum.
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I feel… small
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar made a web based collaborative art piece in 2005 titled We Feel Fine. I remember hearing about it at the time, but I’ve only just gone and checked it out. The project, located at www.wefeelfine.org presents a database of feelings, captured automatically from blog posts. Essentially the system searches for the phrase “I…
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the box of joy
Esther (from VCA) has, with typical boundless energy, entered the blogosphere. The box of joy, a “helmet of leisure and learning”, now has a dedicated blog. Esther has prepared a broad, slightly eclectic, collection of instructional audio for the helmet – check out the details and book a session.
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Airships are our future
I’ve just been reading a post on we make money not art with an interesting comment on the “illusion of progress”. The post quotes architect Usman Haque and points out that the train from Portlaoise (Ireland) to Dublin took 51 minutes with steam engine in 1928, in 2006 it takes 55 minutes. 90 years, 4 minutes late.…
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dog food
I’ve started a new blog – this is it. It’s for all the bits and pieces that don’t belong on any of my other sites. A collection of leftover stuff of mixed value, hence the title dog food. And the title also comes from Bianca, who thinks ‘dog food’ is hilarious. The site will probably…
