Motorized

Here’s a beautiful thing:

 

 

My slow moving geared motor with some unusual hardware attached, purchased from the plumbing department at the hardware store. Anyway, I’m satisfied that this part has been done safely and isn’t going to fail. I’m pretty jazzed that I can bring motion into the work now. What an epic. It’s not over yet, either: I have to drill into the concrete ceiling to anchor the thing safely twenty feet above our heads. Next time I do a show like this I’ll introduce another motor for a wall piece. I’m interested in the potential for magnetism, too.

Several years ago I was in a prehistoric chambered passage cairn in Scotland checking the alignment of the passage to the sun to see if it had a solstice arrangement like Newgrange or Maes Howe when I noticed that there was something in the rear wall of the passage that was so powerfully magnetic that it was shifting my compass by as much as twenty degrees. I’ve often wondered if this was something that the Neolithic builders of the space knew about or if it was simply a fortuitous block of haematite in the wall.

I think it would be fantastic to make works that concealed magnets in the pieces to make things look strange, especially if the pieces were made of materials that were not obviously metal or electronic.