Tuesday, 23 November 2010

Jean Tinguely

Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 in Fribourg, Switzerland – 30 August 1991 in Bern) was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural machines or kinetic art, in the Dada tradition; known officially as metamechanics. Tinguely's art satirized the mindless overproduction of material goods in advanced industrial society.
Tinguely grew up in Basel, but moved to France as a young adult to pursue a career in art. He belonged to the Parisian avantgarde in the mid-twentieth century and was one of the artists who signed the New Realist's manifesto (Nouveau réalisme) in 1960.
His best-known work, a self-destroying sculpture titled Homage to New York (1960), only partially self-destructed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, although his later work, Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962), detonated successfully in front of an audience gathered in the desert outside Las Vegas.
In Arthur Penn's Mickey One (1965) the mime-like Artist (Kamatari Fujiwara) with his self-destructive machine is an obvious Tinguely tribute.

Jean Tinguely was an amazing painter and sculptor artist. However, he became a famous kinetic artist. I recently discovered Jean Tinguely while studying a kinetic art

Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York: A Self Destructing Artistic Masterpiece

Jean Tinguely was born on May 22, 1925. He is an amazing artist, Swiss painter, and sculpture. His most famous genre was from kinetic art. Jean Tinguely turned materials from excess gluttony of mass materials of production and made amazing art pieces. He passed away on August 30, 1991 at the age of 66.

In 1960, Jean Tinguely invented Homage to New York. He had every intention of turning this piece of art into an art of self-destruction. However, Jean’s artistic masterpiece fell short of his expectation of self-destruction at the Museum of Modern Arts which is located in New York City. Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York is about more than machine. It is about many machines and devices that are passed its time and needs vast improvements. “Some of the machinery that runs New York City was exposed as vulnerable, pathetic, and comic, but Tinguely humanized the machinery as he exposed it. Even death was suggested, for Homage to New York was self destructing: the piano was wired for burning, and in turn, the whole structure collapsed” (Humanities, 143).

works

Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel

Jean Tinguely. Alles beweegt!

Homage to New York

Jean Tinguely Kinetic Sculpture from Basel

Centaur ICA - Jean Tinguely

Jean Tinguely kinetic sculpture

Muscle Wire: Motor-less Mechanical Motion!

Muscle Wire (aka Nitinol) is a technology often used in applications where mechanics require discreetness, such as textiles or nano applications.

On day one, participants will construct two kinds of mechanisms. The first will be a piece of muscle wire stitched into felt to create seemingly organic movement. The second mechanism will be a piece of muscle wire attached to a spring and a lever. Several other kinds of mechanisms will be discussed.
On day two, participants will build a basic circuit that will automatically switch the muscle wire on and off. Students will learn to control the timing of this circuit. This class is designed for beginners with no previous electronics experience.
Here are some examples of muscle wire in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQbzgW-hbDg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8L_etiBGMc

Instructor
Amanda Ervin teaches electronics courses, ranging from synthesizers to sensor applications. She received her Combined Media MFA from The University at Albany in 2005 where her concentration was digital imaging, photography, and electronics. The focus of her artwork meanders through questions of identity politics and self representation, often awkwardly hitting nerves like sexuality and discrimination. Additionally, Amanda’s sound work has included performances at Dixon Place, Handmade Music at 3rd Ward, The Drunkard’s Wife at Rubulad, Galapogos Art Space, and Jack the Pelican Presents. She currently lives in Brooklyn, and works as a freelance retoucher and graphic designer and at SUNY Purchase digitizing and archiving artwork for scholarly research. See her work at http://pixelatedpoindextress.wordpress.com/

How to build something by muscle wire

How to work out what resistor you will need:
If you do not have a resistor in series ( in front of) your muscle it is likely to burn up.

The equation to work out what resistor you will need in series with your wire is :
resistor (Ohms) = (power supply(Volts) /current required to make the muscle move(Amps) ) – total resistance of the muscle (Ohms)

First of all find the diameter of the wire your using:
Measure the length of your muscle wire you will be using in one wire:
Use the datasheet listed above to look up the Resistance (Ohms/Inch) and the Approximate* Current
at Room Temperature (mA) of your muscle wire.
Note down what voltage you will be putting through the muscle wire. (this should be done using a transistor and from a separate power supply NOT from your computer through the arduino )
Now that we know the voltage the length of our muscle wire, how much resistance it has per inch (Resistance (Ohms/Inch)) and how much current it wants (Approximate* Current) . we can use ohms law to calculate what resistor we’ll need.
For example we’re making a muscle out of a piece of 0.008″ Dynalloy Flexinol Wire, our muscle will be made of 2 inches of Flexinol Wire and we are using a 9 volt power supply. Using the dtasheet we find the 0.008″ wire has a resistance of 0.8 Ohms per inch and wants 610 mA of power in order to move.
So we have the following.
Voltage supply (V) = 9v ;
Resistance of our muscle in Ohms = 0.8 * 2 (inches) = 1.6Ohms
note, you should also double check the actual resistance of your muscle by measuring it with a multimeter as there are many factors that can change it’s resistance.
Now using ohms law we find that if we did not use a resistor in series with our muscle the muscle would be getting 9 (volts) / 1.6 (Ohms) giving the muscle 5.625 Amps of current, this is far to much current as the muscle should be getting 610mA or .61 Amps.
To find out what resistor we will need we use the equation 9 (V) / 1.6(Ohms) + x(Ohms) = .61(Amp) where the value of x is our resistor in Ohms, so if we rearrange the equation we find that x = (9 (V) /.61 (A) ) – 1.6 so X = 13.15 so we will need a resistor around 13.15 Ohms.
Because a lot of current will be running through this resistor you should use a high wattage resistor these are usually physically bigger.

Inchworm robot with muscle-wire

Muscle wire actuator

1.5gram Gliding Robot doing Phototaxis

da vinci history the worlds smallest ornithopter

Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of Fractal Geometry, Dies

Former Big Think guest Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, has died of cancer at the age of 85, according to the New York Times. The newspaper describes him as "a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields."
When Mandelbrot first began the work that led to the birth of fractal geometry, there was "an explosion of interest" from his colleagues he told us during his Big Think interview: "Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could ... from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but by then mathematicians had become very abstract." By contrast, the complex mathematical shapes called fractals were not only available to the senses, they were downright beautiful

The shapes didn't just turn mathematicians' heads, either, Mandelbrot recounted. Fractals have become beloved by non-mathematicians around the world, to the point of entering the popular culture. There is now not just one but a whole genre of "fractal nightclubs" (he doesn't know what kind of clubs they are, but says he has a guess), as well as a popular rock song named after the most famous fractal of all, the Mandelbrot set.

Mandelbrot admitted, however, that while he may have been the first to discover the mathematics behind the rough, self-similar shapes known as fractals, he was by no means the first to notice their prevalence in nature. As he points out, fractals have had a long distinguished history of appearing in the works of great artists, from the French landscape painter Poussin to the Japanese master Hokusai. And as you might expect, modern digital artists are now doing them one better: through the power of fractal equations, for example, computers can now generate clouds so photorealistic, they're indistinguishable from the real thing.

Fractal Zoom Mandelbrot Corner

Mandelbrot, Much bigger than the universe! deep zoom

chaos

Mathematics & art

fractal geometry mandelbrot

What Is a Fractal?

And who is this guy Mandelbrot?

Images and text by Alan Beck The word "fractal" was coined less than twenty years ago by one of history's most creative mathematicians, Benoit Mandelbrot, whose seminal work, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, first introduced and explained concepts underlying this new vision. Although prior mathematical thinkers like Cantor, Hausdorff, Julia, Koch, Peano, Poincare, Richardson, Sierpinski, Weierstrass and others had attained isolated insights of fractal understanding, such ideas were largely ignored until Mandelbrot's genius forged them at a single blow into a gorgeously coherent and fruitful discipline.

Lamp
Mandelbrot derived the term "fractal" from the Latin verb frangere, meaning to break or fragment. Basically, a fractal is any pattern that reveals greater complexity as it is enlarged. Thus, fractals graphically portray the notion of "worlds within worlds" which has obsessed Western culture from its tenth-century beginnings.
Traditional Euclidean patterns appear simpler as they are magnified; as you home in on one area, the shape looks more and more like a straight line. In the language of calculus such curves are differentiable. The trajectory of an artillery shell is a classic example. But fractals, like dendritic branches of lightning or bumps of broccoli, are not differentiable: the closer you come, the more detail you see. Infinity is implicit and invisible in the computations of calculus but explicit and graphically manifest in fractals.
Serpentes

Whether generated by computers or natural processes, all fractals are spun from what scientists call a "positive feedback loop." Something--data or matter--goes in one "end," undergoes a given, often very slight, modification and comes out the other. Fractals are produced when the output is fed back into the system as input again and again.

LarvasLeaf

Fractals show us that the simplest engines of change often produce exquisitely elaborate patterns. Such systems are at work all around us, from the stock market to the stars. And to the fractal artist, Mandelbrot's insights echo Kandinsky's assertion that "the process of creation is the same in art and nature."

theo jansen

Theo Jansen (born March 14, 1948, in The Hague, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals and are able to walk using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands. His animated works are a fusion of art and engineering; in a car company television commercial Jansen says: "The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds."

Since 1990 Theo Jansen has been occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventually he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.