Posted on Thu 26 May 2016
Motion sensitive
Finally all of our carefully reasoned parts and materials have arrived following our recent tests. The key elements have been the arrangement of the new motorised arm that descends from the Skirt neck.
Posted by
Project
Craft + Technology Residencies: The Flying Skirt Light Shade
At first the light shade hangs in a limp felt form, until is switched on, then it begins to rotate and the skirt opens out, silently spinning like a dancer’s.Finally all of our carefully reasoned parts and materials have arrived following our recent tests. The key elements have been the arrangement of the new motorised arm that descends from the Skirt neck.
Mounted with a small motor and prop blade, the arm lifts to engage with and coherence the Skirt. Currently the arm is a driven by data pulled from cleverly coded motion sensor running through Simons laptop. The greater the vibrancy of movement closer to the Flying Skirt the more the arm fluctuates, producing a swathe of Skirt shapes. The arm is capable of creating all the ripples patterns of the manual edition and the stable curvaceous deformations familiar to that of a clay pot on a wheel verging on collapse. In short The Flying Skirt lives.
To get here there have been a few fairly preposterous tests and arrangements of arms and motors that we’ve felt necessary to look at, happily we haven’t needed the the ridiculous ones despite what we learnt from them and the arm is presently a slender discrete shape(images below).
The next stage looks to fine tune the motion capture software, integrate the hardwire and review how we can involve the new LED illumination with the motion data!
