We have been keeping a blog since 2008. It is a chronological listing of many topics related to Wood that Works. You will find information about sculptures, inspirations, other artists, day to day life in the shop. The topics are many and fascinating. If you are an avid follower of David's work we encourage you to subscribe to this blog to receive the regular updates.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 4:18PM I've been exploring some our our "vintage" video from the early 1990's and stumbled on this clip.
The is my daughter Amy's new kitten Jasmine finding all the joys of exploring the home of a kinetic sculptor. The sculpture is called Symphony, one of my few freestanding sculptures. I built it in 1994.
Friday, May 22, 2009 at 4:08PM This video shows one full cycle of the kinetic wall sculpture entitled Evolution. Full cycle is the time from one push of the spring mechanism until the next. Evolution has a particularly long cycle time of about 5 minutes. Initially the two wheels move in opposite directions at similar speeds. The back wheel usually (but not always) slows down first and starts rocking back and forth creating constantly shifting patterns throughout the cycle. I find some of the most interesting patterns are created near the end of the cycle when both wheels are moving very slowly. Total run time is about 4 hours per complete winding. You can find more information about Evolution by going to the Evolution page at woodthatworks.com. I've detailed my thoughts throughout the design process earlier in this blog starting here.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 1:14PM by Marji
Time for me to start adding my two cents to this blog!
David and I love to visit the various craft shows around the northeast. The roots of Wood that Works are firmly planted in the now historic Rhinebeck shows of the '70s so there is some nostalgia mixed in with our exploring and the collecting of inspiring ideas. At these events we also continue to add to our collection of American Crafts and odd and wonderful things. Years ago we found "Cogworks" at the Mt. Sunapee Craft show and we left with one of their "educational gear toys" under our arm. It is beautifully crafted and has provided us with hours of enjoyment - however, we feel it is not correctly marketed. It should be sold as a puzzle!
At the time of purchase we were told that there was only one way to get the gears onto their backboard, without any part hanging over an edge, and have all the gears turn. This is the "original one solution".
But oh, a challenge was born and for years guests at our house, especially engineers, have spent hours trying to find additional solutions. Their perseverance has paid off and to date, two other solutions have been found. Each has been named after the friend or relative that first discovered it. The "Russell Solution" was the first alternative and whereas the original solution was perfectly symmetrical, this one is a radial symmetrical design.
The third solution is the "Evan Solution" and it is totally random - no symmetry at all. You should meet Evan!
So we have 3 solutions but the question remains, are there any others...
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 1:10PM
After many months of delay I finally built the first prototype of "Evolution" a month or so ago. It has made it from the studio, where I tweaked it for a few weeks, to our dining room so I can live with it in a nice environment as I continue the testing.
The sculpture works as I had hoped it would. The patterning is quite dramatic and very different from any of my previous work. The animation above captures the essence of the motion and patterns but not the full length or complexity of a cycle from spring push to spring push, usually around 3 minutes. The wheels move quite slowly toward the end of the cycle creating some of my favorite patterns. The relatively large mass off the wood wheels allows for this slow motion while still storing enough energy to trigger the spring mechanism. The cycle times and patterns are not regular. They vary depending on the speed and direction the wheels are moving relative to each other when the spring push occurs. I'll put up a video soon.
Marji thought of the name "Evolution" for this sculpture because of my series of blog posts describing the process of designing this piece. The series starts at this link. I plan to keep testing the Evolution for a few weeks and hopefully make a test production run next month.
Sunday, May 3, 2009 at 1:07PM
Free screen savers of my kinetic sculptures available here.
After many requests over the years I've finally found a way to create screen savers of my spring driven wood sculptures. Time and technology have come together to make it possible.
I've been building animations of my kinetic sculpture ideas in Adobe After Effects for many years because it works well with my drawing program of choice, Adobe Illustrator. The animations I made were too small to fill a screen and when I increased the size the animation files became huge. It wasn't a practical screen saver. Jump forward a few years. Video compression techniques have greatly improved giving smaller file sizes and most internet connections are faster so downloading isn't a problem.
The last piece of the puzzle was finding a way to turn the animations into actual screen savers that would run on any machine. A bit of internet research led me to a program called iScreensaver Designer. It takes the animation movies I create and converts them into screen savers that can work on Macs or Windows computers. The only catch is that the computer must have Apple's Quicktime installed for the screen saver to play but that is also free and readily available.
Needless to say once I found that I had a whole screen to work with I had to play a little. It's great fun!
You can find my first screen savers at this link. I've decided to share them for free. Each screen saver is based on one of my actual sculptures and shows a brief approximation of how that sculpture moves. Keep in mind that the animation is fixed and doesn't vary over time like the motion in the "real" world. To see that you'll have to come and see the actual sculptures.
Enjoy!
