25.5.09 Incredible

A 60 rpm (revolutions per minute) motor drives the entire mechanism. It rotates once every second. The following pulley rotates once every 5 seconds (1:5 ratio). The next rotates once every 60 seconds or 1 minute. Then 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, and 1 decade. The decade wheel carries the load of the large arc. The large arc rotates once every century. The final ratio between the 60 rpm motor and the large arc is approximately 1:31.6 billion.

Each wheel is marked with a black nut to highlight a position that could be tracked over time. Along the arc, 100 lines mark the divisions of each passing year. When the clock finally reaches the end of a 100 year cycle, the arc falls off its track onto the floor.

I recently had to write a self-reflective essay for the end of my degree. They asked me what inspired me and I said that pretty much the only thing was humanity's ceaseless ability to produce wasteful, expensive, totally pointless and useless crap born of jealousy, greed and the simple desire to do something, anything that just makes your head spin and your jaw drag along the ground. The kind of thing that when you see it you just have to phone everyone to tell them about it in case it's existence was just something you dreamt about. This thing is staggering, just incredible.

Many, many thanks to James Allen for bringing it to my attention.

The original article is here.

8.4.09 Garnishing/Varnishing

Photos from box construction

4.4.09 Update. Silly word.

Photos from construction of the blocks for the box.

The wooden box that they'll slot in, make very satisfying noises.

Exhibit 3, some exciting circuitry/micro-controller wizardry.

And some resistors all tagged according to their readings on the micro-controllers. Each one has a different resistance and it's this that's being used to check which block is in which slot based on the returning current.

14.3.09 City of Skyscrapers

City Of Glass on what is hopefully, it's final incarnation.

The interface has been massively improved to make it faster and simpler. The colours are more realistic. I managed to use a formula to ensure that the words in the boxes were the most contrasted with the colour of that cell. It also no longer linearly disseminates each cell but does it en masse.

Here's a kind of vision of how I hope it could one day be displayed. For most impact itowuld obviously have to have the presence of a skyscraper.

Or perhaps more ideally, on an actual skyscraper.

14.3.09 What's the big idea?

This is a very rough sketch of the overall idea for the Oulipo project. A box that acts a a physical interface controls the mathematical input for the bisquares that are then used to output a story. This is pretty much the very first sketchy design.