The Machine: November 2014

Our group met on Wednesday to discuss a newer approach to the project. We talked about various ways we could use the wire to constrict the middle of our plaster shapes, possibly varying the tension with the robot.

We discovered that it was the best to wrap the wire around after pouring plaster, as opposed to wrapping and then pouring. Also, we thought it would be interesting if we wound the wire around more than once, kind of in a helix pattern, but it proved difficult to keep the shape while maintaining tension in the line.

As another experiment, we used a nylon glove to see if we could play with wire tension to make the fingers spread out. The not-as-porous material was much easier to remove than the nylon pantyhose we'd been using. Kind of looks like some sort of person, doesn't it?

After that, we tried forming a catenary with the plaster. Either the mix was too watery (not really) or the horizontal tension wasn't enough, but all of the plaster went to the middle of the curve during all of our tries. We thought about varying tension on the wire again in the middle, but also tried to create "legs" if this shape was held upside down.

Lastly, we tried poking another attempted catenary with the broken finger in the glove. Our original idea was to use the robot and a capped sharpie to poke the hole, varying depth, but we're still trying to find objects that create a good looking hole. Again, we tried to extend the "legs" as far as we could but they were too fragile and broke while removing the nylons. If we waited longer, they would have been impossible to remove. We are considering using balloons instead of nylons.