Phenomenological Drawings

The drawings of my machine's phenomena took an incredibly long time, but I have to say that I'm pretty happy with them. The drawing at the top of the first picture shows the light intensity of the above my machine changing with the sound coming out of the radio. After I finished the drawing, I realized that it also reminded me of something else. In high school, when we learned about the physics of sound waves, they were represented in that fashion, with changes in air pressure moving back and forth to create vibrations in your ear drum. The drawing is of light intensity over time, but it also shows the data that the light was receiving at the time.

The drawing on the bottom of this page is my favourite one. I call it the "Crazy 88", because I drew eight switches is in eight states for a total of sixty-four switches, then I traced over three switches in each column, for twenty four more iterations, making 88. Plus, Kill Bill was a kickass movie.

The drawing is interesting because it shows the sequencing of the machine, but it also shows that there's some inherent matrix at work in the machine. Each column has one switch that's currently on, one switch that just was on, and one switch that is about to be on. These are the switches that have a bolder outline on the drawing, with the switch that's on having the thickest outline.

The drawing is a temporal one, though, showing a progression in every column and every row. At any one time while the machine is operation, one of those states (column/row) is true, and you can easily predict what the next state is, and easily see what the last state was.

I will say this, though, that scan is completely terrible. I really like that drawing, and it didn't turn out well at all in the CadLab's scanner. I'm going to try and scan it again using some other method, though, because this one is atrocious.My final drawing actually came out really nicely, and it shows the movement of the crankshafts as the machine is operating. I actually have a photo that looks just like this, which I posted before, but this image shows a better geometry, I think. There are two very pronounced star shapes present in this drawing, and I think that's pretty interesting, because when I started making this machine, I was only thinking in terms of circles, and it never really occurred to me that I might get that kind of shape.