Work in Progress :: Balance comes from within. It’s delicate. And sometimes we fall over.
March 2012:
Up and running for the first time
Motor unit working well…
Feb 2012: Custom tilt sensor unit & motor cage attached to foot of sofa.
Sofa skeleton in approximate balance.
Nov 2011 update: Working two axis prototype
June 2011 update: Working prototype balances with one motor, and soon with two!
Support and research for this project began through a summer 2010 fellowship at Carnegie Mellon’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.
Initial look test with armchair:
The concept of this project is a 2 or 3 person sofa which balances, perpetually teetering on one leg, much as the armchair in the photos below. Within the body of the sofa will be a robotic assembly which maintains balance dynamically. As the sofa begins to fall, the mechanism will sense tilting and exert a force appropriate to counter the falling, resulting in an endless wobbling back and forth.
The conceptual point of departure of my artwork at present is the way in which we individually must negotiate and dance with external forces in our lives. Adaptive mechanisms are understood by life sciences as critical to survival. Rigid things tumble and fracture.
We incessantly adjust ourselves, our positions, and our self-perceptions in relation to encounters with power, be that in the form of an intimate relationship, financial debt, or subtler matters of identity. Gravity here serves as an apt metaphor in its invisible ubiquity.
The sofa knows many uses, from chatting to dining to sex to job interviews. This quotidian device facilitates the full range of intimate human interactions. This project, by setting its function into an unusual relationship with its form, hopes to shine fresh light into our habitual perspectives and relationships.
Winter 2010/11: Work is presently focused on engineering challenges. Actuators and control systems are in design; materials are being sourced. Sculpture fabrication will begin Spring 2011.
Thanks go to Cycle Electric, Inc for support in the form of an aftermarket Harley Davidson V-Twin alternator, to soon become one heck of a torque source:
Screenshots of two versions of control simulation software:
(Summer 2010) A basic visualization:
(Fall 2010) More robust modeling of equations of motion, simulation of actuators and control systems:
