Gijs Gieskes has made many wonderful machines from gameboys or other machines which he’s circuitbent.
He writes about the Acid Machine:
The circle with the lines that you see on the top of the machine, rotates and displays the note you are playing.
When you play a C the lines in the middle circle will be standing still.. from the C it will go outward, displaying all notes on a keyboard in 12 steps.
It works by making a LED blink in the frequency of the sound, and rotating the image at a set speed.
An interesting variation of the zoetrope principle where the camera shutter is used instead of slits or strobes to freeze the motion. The downside (or potentially part of the attraction) is that the viewer needs to watch through a machine to experience the desired effect.
In March 2007 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London we hosted an evening of animation related events which I took as an opportunity to make some more examples of my Phonographantasmascope, an extension of the Zoetrope principle.
It is all live action and works by using the shutter speed of the camera rather than the rather irritating stroboscope methods other 3D Zoetropes use.
Segment #1: Apollo 11 ignition and liftoff (high speed)
Segment #2: Apollo 11 tracking (high speed)
Segment #3: Apollo 8 ignition and liftoff (normal speed)
Eadweard Muybridge was hired by Leland Stanford to answer the question if a horse had all four legs in the air at any time at a full gallop. Although in 1878 he had already proved this with a single photograph the following year he devised a more elaborate setup with twenty-four cameras setup over a twenty foot length triggered by the horse’s hoofs as it galloped past. The resulting photographs were widely published (and later the basis for a book by Stanford) and a popular culture sensation.
Realizing that he was onto something, Eadweard invented the Zoopraxiscope which projected images from a rotating glass disk to give the impression of motion – creating the first movie projector.
A Dream of Pastures is an interactive outdoor sculpture and animated light projection. On the exterior wall of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the ghostly form of a horse glows on the shadowy brick. On the ground several meters in front of it, a stationary bicycle beckons for investigation from the viewer.
As the viewer pedals the bicycle, he discovers that the phantom horse moves accordingly, animated by a mysterious system of projecting lights and turning gears. The viewer pedals more vigorously, the gears rotate more quickly, and the horse of light breaks into a gallop. Sitting in the saddle, the viewer creates a shadow that lines up with the horse, casting himself as a jockey in the projected world, galloping through the empty pastures of a fictitious world at an exhilarating pace.
It’s not clear to me if the connection is intentional or coincidence, but I’d like to think it’s a modern interactive interpretation of an important historical moment.
The clock features a beautiful “grasshopper escapement” styled as the Chronophage (Time Eater)
Dr Taylor, an inventor and horologist, has put 500,000 pounds of his own money and seven years into developing the clock, which has been inspired from a design by a clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude.
Of John Harrison’s many innovations, he came up with the ‘grasshopper escapement, explained Dr Taylor, referring to the device used by Harrison to turn rotational motion into a pendulum motion for timekeeping.
“No one knows how a grasshopper escapement works, so I decided to turn the clock inside out and, instead of making the escapement 35 mm across, it is 1.5 m across.”
He calls the new version of the escapement a Chronophage (time-eater) a fearsome beast which drives the clock, literally eating away time.
I love vacuum tubes. I since my mid 20s I’ve collected and used many different tube amplifiers from a vintage McIntosh MC240, a Dynaco ST-70 to newer Golden Tube Audio and Audio Electronic Supply amps. Even my CD player has a tube preamp built into it and I also have a nixie clock and even a hand blown custom light bulb.
To see all the steps in their manufacture and how easily one person preforms all the highly skilled operations is amazing.
Machine Thinking pal Eddie Codel was camera dude for BoingBoingtv’s episode filmed at the Long Now Foundation’s museum for the first ever Mechcanicrawl. Part One of this series covers the 10,000 year clock the Long Now Foundation is building to be squirreled away into a remote mountain.
Watch carefully at 2:14 at the video – yours truly makes a cameo appearance.
Del’s “Nutty Device” does absolutely nothing except amaze. Built with only wood and glue (including all the gears and chains) he has managed to incorporate a bewildering number of mechanisms and types of motion. Oh yeah, and it’s modular so he can take whole chunks off at once.
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