Today we finish up the piece from last week; “Cuckoo Clock Sans Owl” now officially Titled  Masters of the Obvious. I decided on this title in a convoluted fashion. All will become clear hopefully by the end of this entry. Last week I had added three nice cams to the left side of the piece, my next move was to cut out some blocks to move up and down on the cam follower levers.

I drilled some tiny holes and mounted these using music wire for tracks, they slide up and down nicely as can be seen in the video of the completed work:

You might be wondering “so why and airplane pilot, a shell and a cardinal? And what does this have to do with an owl?

This Plastic Owl lives on my studio roof, so that explains a good part of things, the title Masters of the Obvious? In the mid 90s, one of my favorite local bands ( although now in Chicago ), hell, it sounded good at the time!

You might have noticed that I don’t devise an overall plan for my work. Instead, I keep lots of material on hand and go through a process of replacing elements and exploring relationships until something emerges. Often, the original function of the piece moves into the background and is superseded by movement, gesture and associations of the materials and found objects. At best, what emerges is unexpected and expands my range of mechanical elements, movement and form which leads into the next work.

This week I started with a half completed wall piece. I had let this one rest while waiting for the right elements to come my way.

The piece has a ratchet mechanism based on something I fished out of the book Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements by Henry Brown. I salivate a bit every time I look through this book, a bit of mechanical porn from 1871.

I loved my cuckoo clock as a kid and have always wanted to make a similar mechanism, here we have a door which opens up every ten turns of the crank,

And that element I’ve been waiting for? I used a piece of an old ruler thinking it might be interesting as the central object appearing in the door but “7/8″ just didn’t do it for me. After some searching I found this book in a Saugatuck Michigan antiques mall with wonderful bird illustrations.

I selected this owl as a central image for the piece, here it is in place.

BTW, stay tuned for my next entry where I get into a little bit of tight squeeze with some gears and things!

I feel a bit sluggish as I write this. I always experience a bit of an energy lull after completing a project and this one was no exception. I never set out with a definite goal in mind and usually let things evolve as they see fit.  The piece is done when it’s done. Given that, a few things changed towards the end.

The biggest change; the dizzy pigeon spinning disk did not work visually up on top, it was too massive and took all of the attention away from the delicate yellow bird. I loved the image of the pigeon and decided to place it on the main hub where it formed a nice triangle between the lens and the crank. Placed a steel ball bearing on the ramp, our friendly bird watches it roll back and forth adding a  satisfying “click” when it hits the end of the ramp. Because the ratchet tended to slip backwards when lifting the heavy ramp I added a spring underneath to create some friction on the ratchet.

Here’s a rough video of the completed piece

Next week I plan to get back to work on a wall piece which has been waiting for some attention. It should be interesting to see how this turns out!

Things continued this afternoon working on the ratchet piece now roughly titled “Bird Watching”. I generally come up with a title about 5 minutes before finishing but in this case the subject matter is leading me toward this end. Birds seem to be coming up quite a bit as subject matter in my work these days.

Once a year I show my students at Mass Art an interview with painter Susan Rothenberg. In the video she discusses her use of horses as subject matter. She mentions that she was not particularly attracted to horses when she started using them, they just seemed to be the right thing. I’m more of a Siamese cat and dog person, but birds have the right quality for me.

I started the afternoon off by putting together a little turning mechanism, as the bird moves back and forth the wire connected to the bird hits another wire and turns the bird on its base.

Recently I found a very cool old slide projector tossed out in my building mail room and salvaged some beautiful lenses including the one pictured below.

After some debate I decided to place it in front of the bird, magnifying it as it moves back and forth. One of the big challenges of this type of work is joining disparate materials, in this case a delicate glass lens to the metal ring framing the piece. I accomplished this through a series of steps;

In the above photo, I’ve joined the lens to a metal ring by drilling holes around the circumference, inserting wires and bending to hold the lens in place. The next step was to mount the lens to the frame though a sixth hole.

And there we are, one big yellow bird.

Here’s a quick video I shot this morning of the ratchet piece in action. I’ve added a few parts including an old wooden ruler section on top of the ratchet to create a little friction ( otherwise it slips counterclockwise ). I’ve also added an interesting cam to the front of the piece. I love cams and think of them as a pure expression of shape creating change in movement over time. This is where I find parallels between kinetic sculpture and the time line in animation; a cam being a time line following a contour.

I’m looking forward this afternoon to adding more action to the piece using this cam and the slow movement of the ratchet wheel.