Wood Idea

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

2010 ZERO1 Symposium highlight

This year’s symposium focused on the issues concerning environment, policy-making, urban planning, sustainable design, and related practices by artists and scientists. It brought a number of great speakers over a 2-day event. I’ve attended the most of it except the panel discussion on the first day due to class - which was a shame as a list of panelists looked interesting! (Did anyone attend this? If yes, how was it?)

Day 1 was run by LEONARD. As I was already familiar with their style (I go to their speaker series at SETI in Mt. View periodically), it was predominated by a perspective from scientists and technologists. Regardless, overall I thought LEONARD and CADRE complimented each other very well over the course of a 2-day event.

All speakers presented his or her expertise on the issues with passion, which was informative and very inspiring (although the problem and idea was nothing new.) But it certainly made me feel good to be part of this - the experience of being there and made me feel even more strong about the issues as an artist and a human being.

Day 2 was hosted by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media in the School of Art and Design at SJSU. I was particularly intrigued by the panel discussion by the Climate Clock teams, which was medicated by Joel Slayton and the focus was around their design strategies. They were posed hard questions (by Joel) and I was curious about their responses as well as enjoyed watching how each team interacted as a group and between teams (but ultimately as a competitor), etc.

Prior to the panel discussion, there was also a great introduction about the Climate Clock initiative by the Public Art Director for the City of San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs, Barbara Goldstein which helped me to understand better from a different angle (a big picture), followed by the presentations by each group which was still work in progress so it was a little bit hard to visualize clearly (but seeing them up on stage was helpful).

One of the Climate Clock teams, Amorphic Robot Works (Chico MacMurtrie, Geo Homsy, Bill Washabaugh, and Gideon Shapiro) also showcased a gigantic sculpture “Inflatable Architectural Growth during the festival on the First Street for Absolute ZERO (and held days of workshop at South Hall). I had a chance to talk to Chico and met his team members during Absolute ZERO and I was totally impressed by their robotic artwork as well as their teamwork. Looking forward to working with them when they will begin their residencies at SJSU and Montalvo Art Center in January.

A great drill press table

If you have a drill press and still havent built a proper table for it, what are you waiting for? Duane made this video showing how his works.

What a nice, simple design. When I built mine, I approached the fence as it it were a fence for a saw. I was needlessly concerned about keeping it parallel with the table. Well, gee...when you are drilling holes, the fence doesnt need to be aligned with anything really. So Duanes design features a single pivot point. Brilliant.

Helping hand

Bill Wilson sent over this short video of what he calls a "helping hand". Very clever way to attach sandpaper discs to random orbit sanders. Just need a board and three dowels. (Bonus points for the Chicago music.)

*****
Mere Minutes

Shot this on Saturday, but just had a chance to upload it. A couple more uses for bender board and I finally got my tomatoes planted.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

WWMM Facebook highlights and tools you dont need

Looking for woodworking project ideas? Here are some of my favorites from the hundreds posted on my Facebook page in the past week. Follow Woodworking for Mere Mortals and you wont miss out!

April Nadeau Meadows

Bob Kovacs

Vaino Liivson

Steve Taggart

Lenka Oujiří

Rich Andrews

Stefans Holzwerkstatt

*****

Tools you dont need?

01 Post finally

There is a reason I dont keep a personal blog--I sort of hate writing in them and can never remember to update them when Im anywhere near a computer and can do anything about it. Apparently that applies to school-related blogs as well....but Ive got me, my zero-one notes, and an internet-connected laptop all together in one place now, so here it is:

Jahnavis Zero-One Thoughts:

First, like many of my classmates, I was disappointed by the presentation qualities. I had not attended the event before and from the way people had been talking about it I had expected something a bit more polished. I know these people are all artists not public speakers, but its very hard to pay attention to a talk when the speaker, however knowledgable, is wandering all over the place and it seemed like a lot of the speakers went up in front of the mike unprepared.

Perhaps because of that my favorite group presentation for the Diridon Station climate clock was that given by Usman Hawks team--the group that was not actually present and had therefore had to prerecord their talk. I felt like I came away with a clear sense of what they wanted to build and why. They wanted to create a self-building, self-maintaining park that drew that worked with the project goal of measurement, computation, and communication. They would have three main robotic devices/attractions: 1) named Huey (and yes, the goofy working names made me smile), also known as the accretion mounds, builds tower out of junk pulled from the air, making larger, thicker ones on bad years. 2) Dewey/sampled box in which 10,000 cloned daffodils (to avoid any genetic variation in results) are planted in batches of 100 every year on site and harvested and saved as a sample of the air that year. 3) Louie/data packer crawls (very slowly) around the park pulling up dirt and packing it into soil sample cubes (with a neat daily data point stamped into the side for kicks) as another measure of the areas health. I like the idea of localized visual feedback devices as art--its like getting a report at the end of the year. The public could look at the proposed pieces and see how well they (and everyone around them) have done for the year in terms of atmospheric pollution. I think it has potential to work in terms of changing peoples actions a bit: I personally do not like to see visible reminders of my failures and I think that seeing a giant mound/tower of crap that was pulled out of the air on a bad year would make me try harder to avoid contributing to it as much the next year. I was also charmed by the concept--I like the machines built from super simple parts and processes that should side-step becoming obsolete and that largely draw their power from nifty things like the sun, temperature change, being wound like a clock, and so on.

I had no idea what the second group (Wired Wilderness) was presenting by the time they got to end of the their presentation, aside from the fact that whatever it was would involve a series of artists. They were one of the more wandering groups--my notes are full of key words and catch phrases for them, but I didnt feel like I came away with anything at all.

The last group presented their Organograph. I felt like they explained themselves well enough, but for some reason it just didnt capture my imagination like the first idea did--it sort of sounded like a fancier version of the Childrens Discovery Museum with a focus on climate. The only bit that really charmed me was the part about wanting to tap into the visceral connection to time humans get from the ticking of a clock and the way it seems to link heartbeats and the passage of time and that was only a minor aside.

The panel was very hard for me to get interested in. I did like Joel Slaytons introduction about paradigm shifts and wanting a project that dealt with computing and sustainability as such, but then it just got very dull and the nature of the answers again made the presenters seem less than perfectly prepared.

The artist presentations after lunch were much more fun. "Particle Falls" is a pretty neat idea, and again I like the localized visual feedback idea--people dont like to see that theyre messing up, its a good sort of reminder to change. I also quite enjoyed Robin Lasser and Marguerite Perrets presentation on "Floating World"--the piece is lovely and I liked the idea of an encampment for displaced voices on all levels. I also really liked the descriptions of the publics interaction with the piece--very cool. I had to leave after Robins presentation to go throw my grandmothers birthday party, and apparently I missed one of the better talks as a result.

Starting in on next weeks project

Im getting a head start this week! Ive already bought lumber and have a working design for this weeks project: an herb planter. Keep up with my progress by using #herbplanter on Twitter or Keek.

Apr 6, 2013 | Designing the herb planter. #herbplanter by SteveRamsey on Keek.com

*****

Mere Minutes

Monday, March 3, 2014

Wooden Gear Clocks

One of my experiences as a child was watching my Father repair almost anything he found or was given. One thing that he inherited from my Grandfather was an old wooden gear clock made in Germany. My Father spent a lot of time corresponding with companies in Germany to find replacement parts. One of the hardest things to find was the "paper" bellows that was used for the cuckoo (the little bird that popped out of a little door on the clock to announce the time). But in the end we had a working wooden gear clock that was really unique.

Having this memory I decided to surf the internet to see if wooden gear clocks still existed.

I found someone who was making some gears.

Much to my surprise I found a site that sells plans to make such clocks. I could not find one that looked like the clock we had but I found some very very interesting designs.

The creator also has a short YouTube video sowing the clocks in action.

The best video of all is this one about using shop tools to make a clock.