Electromechanical Sculpture
As someone who is both a computer geek and a sculptor, I've naturally had an interest in combining the two pursuits. I've never tried to create any refined, polished artwork in this genre, but these projects have always been enjoyable.

The Whatchamathumper
Date:
April 2004
Media/tools:
copper tubing, Lego Mindstorm motors, light sensors, MIT Cricket sensor nodes, paint can, pre-made drum, wood
The Whatchamathumper was an interactive mechanical percussionist, inspired by the crazy musical contraptions that Dr. Seuss drew for his children's books. This was a class project that I worked on with another student (Nathan Wilcox) during graduate school, for a class called Things that Think.

The concept was to create a musical toy that would engage the viewer both visually and through sound, combining familiar elements in an unfamiliar way. There were four instruments--a drum, a triangle, a clapper, and a strummer--which the viewer controlled by interacting with an array of light sensors. The instruments were driven by MIT Cricket sensor nodes coupled with Lego Mindstorm motors.

My then-two-year-old nephew got to see this thing in action during a visit to Colorado, and he gave it a happy burble of approval, which is the highest critical praise I could ask for.


noise
Date:
May 1994
Media/tools:
Common Lisp, iron rods, light sensors, muslin, Nerf ball, papier-mache, wood, Yamaha SY22 synthesizer
This was my final project for a sculpture class in my first year of college, and it was a blast to work on. It was an exploration of three different types of noise: white noise, Brownian noise, and 1/f (or pink) noise. The fabric-draped structures are loosely inspired by the sort of shapes one finds in a plot of 1/f noise, but the important part of this sculpture was something I can't show here: it made interactive music via a connected synthesizer.

"Music" may be a bit of a stretch, but it did sound nice. When nobody was walking around inside the installation, it produced a soft background of notes generated at random. When a person walked between the lights and three photocells embedded in the base, the sound became more distinct, and the notes were generated by a 1/f noise algorithm instead, which tends to sound more pleasing and coherent. The brown ball in the middle was actually a giant, homemade trackball, which produced notes following a Brownian pattern, and changed the tempo based on the speed at which the ball was moved.

As a software engineer, this was also a milestone for me, because I started learning object-oriented programming through working on this project (CLOS, specifically).