mattbell

I finished three new laser-cut spiral designs in the two days prior to Maker Faire.  I pushed on several new things -- intricate boundaries, using multiple types of wood in the same design, handling large numbers of pieces, and working with a new, bigger type of veneer.  All in all, it's really impressive that all three designs worked out more or less flawlessly. 

Design 1:
 
 


Design 2:
 

Design 3:
 

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( New photos of other designs )

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( Photos of assembly process )

We're looking for people to give talks on our boat at Ephemerisle.  If you're interested, please let me know.

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Memocracy is a floating camp devoted to sharing ideas that could change the world.  We're putting together a series of talks around various clusters of topics.  If you're interested in offering a talk, demo, debate, or interactive simulation, let us know.  Talks may be time-limited depending on demand, but plan on something between 2 and 20 minutes for now.  Yes, you can give a good talk in 2 minutes... it's plenty of time for a simple but novel concept. 

Here are the topic clusters:

- Practical tools for community-building and freedom  (ad-hoc organizing tools, voting systems, group consensus-building techniques, communication and information-sharing systems, online & offline collaboration tools...)
- Human enhancement  (personal development, self-tracking, technological augmentation of human capability, skills for radical self-reliance...)
- Practical skills for living on water  (how to make floating platforms, how to tie knots, skills for piloting boats, alternative energy technologies suitable for water use...)
- Creativity and innovation  (technology and meme adoption cycles, brainstorming techniques, alternate lifestyles...)
- Reinventing economics  (analysis of US economic situation, economic opportunities on seasteads...)

If there's a topic you're passionate about that you want to present that does not fit on this list, let us know. 

We do have a projector available, but we don't know yet if we will bring it.  (Bringing a projector limits us to having all our presentations at night, and that may be a bad thing.  However, if there is high demand, we will consider it)  If we don't have a projector, we'll certainly have a whiteboard. 

If you'd like to give a talk please let me know at mattkim99@yahoo.com (alternate spam address, some delay expected).  Let us know the topic, and when you plan on arriving at and leaving Ephemerisle. 

Don't just spectate!  Research big ideas and participate!  We'll be putting a presentation schedule together over the next couple of months. 

Blurb:

For some, the Dandelions will be a metaphor for the spread of civilization and new ideas onto the ocean, a further diaspora of the human race.  For others, the Dandelions will be giant climbable floating koosh balls made from pool noodles, and the most important thing about them will be whether they can climb to the top of one without falling over.   Either way, having one or more of these Dandelions floating around in the middle of the swim area will add aesthetic and fun value to the Ephemerisle experience.

Here’s a quick mock-up showing the concepts for the 9 foot diameter and 13 foot diameter versions:

 

It turns out Dollar Tree sells 48" pool noodles for $1 each, which enables this project to be done for a relatively low price.

If you're planning on attending Ephemerisle or (even better) interested in making some art with me, let me know your take on these ideas:

1. Floating balance games:  Inspired by the lightsaber fight on the path to the achievement lounge, we could set up interesting floating structures (eg a long thin bar or a series of small platforms) and let people do lightsaber fights, tugs of war, and other fun events that end in people falling off and splashing into the water. 

2. Walk on water. Find a way of putting a platform that's, say, 20 feet long and 5 feet wide just an inch or two below the water's surface. This is actually rather tricky to do, as the added weight of the people likely will affect the height of the platform, and I wouldn't want it to drop more than an inch or two. The brute force way to do this would be to get, say, four Coleman Islands which would collectively hold 8000 pounds, and then use them to suspend the underwater platform in the middle. Then several people could walk along the walk-on-water platform with ease.

3. Floating obstacle course.  This could consist of narrow beams, spaced platforms you jump between, and other challenges.    It would be more difficult, less soft and forgiving, and substantially smaller than this inflatable monster. 

4. Walk-on lilypads.  This would be kind of like the floating obstacle course, but more artistic.  Viewers would see a series of large lilypads floating in the water.  However, an underwater support structure would connect these lilypads, allowing people to step from one to another and be supported.  The walk-on lilypads could be made with thick transparent plastic on top, allowing them to be lit from the inside (and thus glow at night).

5. Aquatic erector set. This falls more into the "interactive art" category. Basically, if you find poles of various lengths and construct receptacles for those poles out of foam or other materials, you could have a truly flexible building system. If the receptacles are made out of foam or hollow plastic, they would likely float. This would allow people to easily build a variety of interesting structures on the playa surface. Custom foam parts can be mass produced with expanding 2-part foam mix. Thus stuff is fairly brittle though... it would likely have to be reinforced with something.

6.  Current-ripple visualizer.  This is actually different from the ripple theater.  I envision doing a floating grid of objects that optomechanically shows off the ripples and water currents.  (Optomechanical implies cheap)  For example, a stick pointing out the top of a weighted but buoyant bottle would tilt in response to passing ripples.  A grid of these could look like a field of grain waving in the wind... except that the functions generating the "wind" would look very different. 

7.  Floating dome.  (This is proctologiste 's idea).  You would be able to swim up to the dome and climb on and around it.  (The dome would be skeletal like a burningman dome)  In some versions, the dome might even be mobile, allowing you to move through the water by rotating the dome. 

Having exhausted the entire local supply of zebrawood, I've turned to trying some other woods.  As it turns out, lacewood has some very interesting properties.  When cut perpendicular to the surface of the tree rings, you get a fine and even grain pattern that makes it really easy to match any piece to any other piece.  Cuts parallel to the rings look quite different and have a big splotchy appearance.  See the difference here.

Lacewood's performance under different lighting conditions is drastically different.  It's the sort of thing those hardcore Pixar animators like to put in a movie just to show how awesome their graphic skills are, kind of like a modern version of a painter doing a still life.

Here's what I made -- I wanted to have two spirals, one serving as a source and one as a drain.  I tinkered around with configurations until I found one that was as smooth as possible.  Here's what I got:



Here's a video showing just how much it dances in changing light:


Here are some still photos showing what happens when you get a very directional light source on it:

 

I really pushed myself on my latest design.  It was way more complicated than anything I've tried before, and I made some mistakes, but I think it came out well.

Here's a quick video where you can see how it shines under direct light:



In the shade:



What I learned:

- The tiny ( < 1/100") width of the laser cuts is big enough to start affecting the design, causing holes that accumulate as large numbers of pieces are pushed together.  This made it close to impossible to get the whole thing aligned properly.  If you look at the holes up close, you'll see the pieces don't line up properly.
- With designs this complicated, I should switch to a different kind of backing that I can progressively apply as I add more pieces.  Currently, managing the position of 50+ pieces, each lighter than a feather, is an exercise in frustration.

Here's how well it came out compared to the simulation -- I worked to get the centerline aligned with darker material. 



My workflow for producing it ended up being really tedious:

- Autoconversion of high-res bitmap into vector data: 10 minutes.
- Cleaning up vector data: 3 hours
- Converting vectors into pieces to cut, and rotating them: 3 hours.
- Test cutout: 1 hour
- Real cutout and assembly: : 1 hour
- Getting the damn pieces to not overlap so I could glue them: 1 1/2 hours
- Gluing, sanding, fixing, oiling: 1 1/2 hours.

Unfortunately, there isn't much room for improvement except in the last two steps.... unless I decide to reprogram the original setup to do the first three steps automatically.  This likely will take 10-15 hours, but at least I'll be engaging my brain instead of doing tedious work in CorelDraw and Visio.

Some more construction photos:

 

I really liked how my last round of designs came out, and now I'm interesting in trying something more sophisticated.

These spirals are pretty, but I want to create more complex patterns:



Creating more complex patterns of the style I'm envisioning will require some math though.  As a result, I've written some software that allows me to generate vector fields that correspond to various equations of interest.  Some of the equations are inspired by physical phenomena (eg magnetic fields).  Other equations are designed to create stars, spirals, and waves.  I can superimpose these elements to create more complex patterns:

 

The software chops up the field into areas of roughly the same orientation -- these pieces are destined to be cut from a single piece of wood.
I quickly realized I could write a simulator that took bits of a picture of an actual piece of zebrawood to see what the actual piece would look like, saving hours of work.  For example:

 

Here are some other designs I played with:

 
 
It remains to be seen how hard it will be to actually create these, but I like how they look now.

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I also realized why I like this kind of art so much.  It mixes the rich sensory experience of organic material with the more precise beauty of mathematics.  The experience of looking at and feeling the actual zebrawood spiral is something that doesn't really come across in pictures -- the wood has all kinds of interesting specular highlights and subsurface scattering properties that make it really pop.

This time I used a giant tree in downtown San Francisco. 



More here:

   
 
 

I had a couple of ideas I thought might make fun projects for next year.

1. Walk on water. Find a way of putting a platform that's, say, 20 feet long and 5 feet wide just an inch or two below the water's surface. This is actually rather tricky to do, as the added weight of the people likely will affect the height of the platform, and I wouldn't want it to drop more than an inch or two. The brute force way to do this would be to get, say, four Coleman Islands which would collectively hold 8000 pounds, and then use them to suspend the underwater platform in the middle. Then several people could walk along the walk-on-water platform with ease.

2. Real-life video game with sinking platforms. It wouldn't be hard to construct a platform that holds the weight of a person but only supports their weight for some number of seconds before sinking. After the person gets off, the platform would return to its original level of buoyancy. I could put in a whole line of these things, and let people jump from platform to platform to get to a particular stable goal.