Project Overview
This project is set out to convey a sense of life and warmth and serenity. The shape of the main body uses a 3d modeled whale, which was divided into 45 individual sections which are hung from a mechanism that is fixed on the ceiling, through the rotation of which, each one of the whale pieces moves up and down individually with a slight variation of phase and amplitude of the rotation, together creating the motion of the whale swimming slowly.
Inspiration and Ideation
The inspiration for this project comes from the artist U-ram Choe, some of whose works (‘HYUNDAI X ELEKTRA – METAMORPHOSIS’) focuses on creating the feeling of life, he uses lots of small gears and mechanisms to make the ‘creature’ seem like it is breathing, the warm lighting around the whole piece made it look less metal-like and almost full of life. The clod and rigid and lifeless feeling of all the metal pieces and gears is massively reduced and covered by the overall feeling of warmth and the motion of breathing.
In my project I want to imitate this feeling and make a creature that is full of life. I ended up choosing whale as the main part of the sculpture, as for one I personally like sea creatures and I particularly like whales for their elegance despite the size and for another, the slow motion of whale swimming really speaks well to the feeling of serenity and thus makes me feel calm. Also the shape of the whale is round and smooth (rather than flat or sharp), which adds to the whole feeling by providing the element of comfort.
For the warmth I was planning to have LED strips hanging inside the body of the whale, and have it emit a warm orange-yellow light, which brightens and dims with the motion of the whale as if the whale is breathing or having heart beats, which also adds onto the overall feeling.
The other reason that I want to use the shape of the whale rather than coming up with a new abstract creature is that, when I look at the creature made by Choe, I couldn’t help but felt a sense of unfamiliarity aside from the amazement that it was so full of life. Because the creature was an abstract one, it felt less closely relatable. But with a whale, we all are familiar with it, and it is easier for me to convey what I see on whales to my audiences.
Process and Difficulties in Engineering and Fabrication
I first created an animation using processing to visualize how I want the pieces to move, which also helped me decide exactly how should I design the mechanism that I will discuss down below.
The most challenging aspect of the whole piece is to make the mechanism that I could hang the whale pieces from, which also should have the function of moving the individual pieces up and down consecutively. I ended up with a design of alternating plates (for the rotation radius) and pillars (for hanging the string that connects the whale pieces) as shown below. The biggest problem is that it is not stable, and despite all my effort to reinforce it (including drilling holes on the plate to fix the pillars and having a ring on the other side for the same purpose, and finally having four strings hanging from the top of the mechanism), it broke on me several times.
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And then all there is left is to fix this mechanism and the motor onto a beam that I could hang from the ceiling, which is another whole mess of engineer problems that I won’t go deep further since they are less unique than this one. I will nevertheless provide some of my sketches on this process.
The final step is to tie the whale pieces that I laser-cut onto the mechanism, but this is the final design flaw that I met which I was not able to solve due to the time limit. I will discuss it in the next section.
The Result and My Comments
The results are a little different from what I imagined it to be, because for the whale pieces, it requires them to align perfectly with each other and not move horizontally or rotate, for them to form the shape of the whale. But since I used fishing strings, those problems became even more problematic because the strings are very flexible. Also it is extremely difficult to align the height of the pieces just by eye-balling. So the shape ended up looking pretty messy and was all stacked together due to the rotation.
Despite the fact that in the in-class critique my peers appreciated the fact that it is not a whale, and that personally I do think there is a whole new aesthetics to the new shape as well as room for new meaning to being applied to it, it is fairly far away from what I set out to do from the beginning. To be honest it is a pity that I didn’t notice this last engineering problem and failed to create what I wanted, but in the time constraint environment, I am confident to say that I did my absolute best.
By the way, the mechanism broke again the next morning before the critique when I shoot my video.
Further Development Ideas and My Plan For the Future
For further development I would definitely add light in the main part since I think for my original idea it is an important part and also I already created a cavity for that. Also for stability I need more rigid material to hang the pieces and to prevent them from rotating.
In my mind I still want to finish what I set out to do, despite all the positive feedbacks I got for the current version. It is more of a thing that I feel like I should finish no matter how late I finish it, but before that I will have to take a break from it just so that I don’t stress myself out again on the same thing.
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