More Boxes and Failure

This week Tuesday and Wednesday, I cut up more plexiglass (ouch little pieces of hot plexi everywhere why) and welded them together to make boxes!

Over the weekend I tried to draw on them with smoke, but I just ended up with a partially undone and dusty box.  I did get smoke marks on the box but I'm going to need to fix that weld first.

Prairie Time

IT HAS BEEN AWHILE.

In the meantime the latest art site is CERA which has acres and acres of lovely prairie.  I decided to make a plexiglass box with transparent prints of the prairie on its sides to be placed on a patch of burned prairie.  Making the plexiglass box was an adventure where the plexi-welding chemical somehow managed to get on my face because the syringe applicator is leaky, but nothing happened to my face so that's great.  Here are the pictures that are on the box:

Once the box was assembled with the transparencies attached using a spray adhesive, it looked just like it did in my mind.  So pretty.  However, I did spray a layer of clear, glossy top coat to make the piece a little more durable so I am currently hoping to all that is holy that I will still like the piece once the top coat dries.  I did do three tests of the top coat and it turned out fine with a very slight pebble texture...but I'm anxious.  I will be back with some pictures of the actual box which I have on a camera and not on my computer.

The Body: End result

Here is the final product of the body project!  I'm pretty happy with it overall!  I learned some neat things like how to build a box and that matte spray paint is great.  I also learned the delay() alternative for Arduino so that neopixels hooked up to different data pins can do different things (https://www.baldengineer.com/millis-tutorial.html).

The Body: Progress

My new idea for the body project is fully under way!  This week I've:

• Drew 30 continuous line drawings of my eyes, nose, and lips
• Scanned all of the drawings and layered them in Photoshop
• Printed them on the vinyl cutter
• Stuck the vinyl to plexiglass
• Spray painted the plexiglass a matte black
• Got the all the wood that will make up the box
• Created 2/3 boxes

The last box should be done tonight and then I need to get the electronics working and integrated.  I'll need to figure out where the arduino and wires will go...I'm thinking middle box.  I also found a scratch on the nose plexiglass so I need to figure out if I can re-spray paint that one because it will bug me.

The Body: Experiments

I have finally recovered from Wisp (photos from that coming sometime this upcoming week) so time to get to real business with the body project!  I did a few experiments drawing a continuous line with my arm fully stretched out.  It hurt more than expected and I lasted maybe 10-15 minutes before my arm just couldn't keep itself up anymore.  It was also difficult to keep a smooth line since the sharpie liked to skip a little.

The first image is me just trying to draw with a continuous line and as you can see the line liked to skip around.  The second image I had an image in mind and gave my arm a little more support at the elbow so it's smoother.  

While doing these experiments I came up with a modified idea where I draw something associated with my body (I'm thinking maybe an EKG, but where could I get that done...?) 20-30 times, scan those images, and then laser engrave each iteration into plexiglass.  That could be interesting since there will be different depths where the laser traces over the same area.  I would also probably want to have a layer of color on top of the plexiglass so that the engraving creates some contrast.

Not sure if I'm going to incorporate technology into this one.  My first instinct is almost always "add light," and although I think illuminating the engraved lines would be beautiful I would need to figure out how to build a box to contain it all.

The Night

This past Friday the Site Specific class that I am in currently had our The Night show/tour combination.  I had the main components ready by Friday morning: arduino with sounds and IR sharp, power relay, lamp, two speakers, and two extension cords.  Not wanting to set up too early and risk someone getting too curious about the glowing bench on their way to Bucksbaum, I waited until 4:00pm to set up, a whole three hours before the show's start.  In my mind that was plenty of time.

I was wrong.

I finished at 6:55pm.  That was with a ton of help from Miles and Miriam since I ended up needing longer wires, a capacitor, a power strip, and had to change the code three times to make sure that the IR sharp would trigger when someone walked past it.

In the end, I was happy with how it ended up!  The blue light looked beautiful on the tree branches.

Sounds!

I created three short sounds for the tree installation the other day.  Still trying to work out how to embed mp3s onto blogger...apparently I have to create a site that holds media files?  That source is four years old though so I don't know how accurate that is.