| As a child, I never liked gears. I’ve always associated them with cars, trucks, and buses. They never came alone and were invariably accompanied by noise, dirt, grease, and unpleasant smells. I really grew to hate them when my father would draft my company to help him work on the family car(s). |
| “The mind of a child lasts one hundred years.” – Japanese proverb. |
| I’m still not a fan of mechanical objects. Never have been. No matter how graceful they may be made to be, they are old-fashioned, clunky, inelegant, and prone to failure. Guess there is some truth to the above. Now I am looking at gears and mechanisms to get through this class in order that I might not appear as a non-cooperative stick-in-the-mud (or worse).Today I discovered something very interesting. Looks like gears are used in the insect world to assist in locomotion. I may have to reassess my emotional bias against gears for being – if nothing else, too “man-made.”Click the image of the photograph by an electron microscope of gears in the jumping legs of a “planthopper nymph.” |
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| You are probably wondering about the reference to “Disraeli Gears,” the only gears I ever liked. Here’s the album cover which was totally cool when I was in high school and the album (if it doesn’t get yanked). |
Category Archives: 3D
Ralph Steiner Mechanical Principles 1930
Researching gears for this class, I stumbled across the first video below which is a four minute excerpt of the full length one below.
The contrast between Steiner’s film and the video on how a Tesla automobile is made is as different as the times in which each was made.
Masterfully photographed it is a glimpse into our technological past and a vision into a world which remains largely unseen, just beneath the skin of the machines around us.
Viewing this film eigthy-three years after it was made is like reading a love poem to the craftsmanship, ingenuity, muscles, and sinews of the mechanical age.
Past as Prologue
In preparation of an impending move back to New York in July of 2012, I made the difficult decision to clean my studio. Part of what wound up as trash included floppy disks (8, 5.25 and 3.5 inch!), one-off prototype circuits, models, and materials from my teaching days at New York City’s School of Visual Arts (SVA). These included boxes containing experimental efforts and research into 3D scanning, laser cutting, CNC machining, stereolithography, water-jet cutting, and wax-jet printing as new tools for artists. As someone whose instinct is to save nearly everything of a technological nature (all my work and parts I use to make work!), I thought I was being extraordinarily adult with what was a very difficult purge of the past.
Ironically, a few days later and the night before that week’s trash pickup, I received an email from an author’s representative in the UK asking for information on my now historic work in 3D printing. After some seriously panicked dumpster diving, I was able to salvage one wax-jet fabricated piece whose photo made it into Stephen Hoskins’s new book.
My interests have shifted over the years and I did not know of Stephen or his work. The video below is a terrific introduction to his unique specialization and center:
I am honored to have work included in this book and I want to thank two very good friends who helped to shape this period of my life: Timothy Binkley and Bruce Wands.
Tim Binkley’s invitation to teach in SVA’s MFA program made many things possible. Intimidated by then giant CRTs and the unnerving silence of Photoshop temple devotees I was very happy when I was allocated a terrific little space to use as a classroom. It was a corner room, no heat, windows with wire in the glass, on a floor above the “serious fine artists” where I developed and taught “Electronic Engineering for Artists,” one of the first – if not the first – of its kind in an art or engineering school.
Bruce Wands was the department chair at SVA’s BFA Computer Art Department and the visionary who gave the “Digital Sculpture” class a chance. Bruce was able to appropriate the funds not only run the class (first semester, three students) but to also purchase a CNC machine, and secure three site licenses of AutoCAD. The machine – and my classroom – inhabited a closet at the end of a hall.
Life has changed a lot since then.
2 D object project
I’m liking this as a project for a lot of reasons:
I’m seeing parts like these:
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