spinning
paper
brain –
gear-head motors, PIR sensor, transistors, relay, slip-ring, Lights, wood, paper, graphite powder, aluminum, bicycle tires, wheel, steel cable.
This piece was built up fast, fast.
I was sitting in my studio one morning in 2014, stuck, and broke. I should have been building small, low-current switching regulators, and improving circuit protection on Walker, Porcupine and Rocker. This would take a couple of weeks of work, but I couldn’t settle down to do it. I wanted to jump into something different, get my hands dirty, and get my brain out of the regimented, plodding I’d restricted myself to. But I had no time, and barely enough cash to finish the project I was supposed to be working on.
… I was stuck, but then… I was suddenly disgusted with myself.
Was that it? I couldn’t let myself make something without some definite plan, without funding, without a deadline?
I decided to take the rest of the day off, and try to just make something with whatever left-over materials I had at hand, and trash from the street: bits of metal, hardware, wires, old motors, furniture casters, paper and graphite sticks, bicycle tires, a piece of flexible wood.
12 hours later I had a bare skeleton…The “one day” project turned into weeks of mechanical fiddling. When I mounted the first set of legs, I didn’t like how they looked. Even though it worked, I ripped them off and started again. It was fun to play, to figure things out. But it was also the beginning of a different, simpler way of working. Without access to a lathe, a milling-machine, a drill-press, grinders, or other specialized shop-tools, without money for new materials, I couldn’t build the kind of robotic, moving pieces I’d been working towards.
