Waves in Motion

The Great Wave of Kanagawa in motion, v1 used a crankshaft made out of wooden dowels and duron, with an 8 inch crank height, v2 used a steel crankshaft with a 4 inch crank height.

Name of the piece: Waves in Motion

How your prototype evolved from the original idea to the current prototype: My original crankshaft was made of wooden dowels and duron and was way too flexible to achieve the right movement at the scale that I was building. My crankshafts allowed for too much variation in height, which caused a lot of friction and made the user work really hard to get the thing in motion. 

Ideal visitor experience: I'd love to make, someday, a collection of automata of famous works of art. I think it's fascinating to see forms that we know so well, and that are so part of the global zeitgeist, in motion. I think this exhibit is much more of an art piece than a science piece, but if done really well, I think it could be a really compelling concept. 

Problems you encountered/next steps for this piece (adjustments, rebuild, new ideas, let go of…): in order to make it an exploratorium piece, rather than just an art piece, I think that it could be really cool to use a system of amplifying gears, so that the user turning the crank actually set five giant waves in motion. That element of surprise would be really interesting, and could teach you a lot about the power of a simple crankshaft, plus the giantness of the huge waves would be striking. 

I also toyed with the idea of making a series of shafts that could be removable and insertable, and that would be the next thing to try with this piece (since the first idea would be expensive and large scale). Different axel variations could cause completely different and interesting forms of motion if I could find a way to make the shafts easily affixable and detachable. I had a great time working on this project. I think, even though it's too much of an art piece as it stands and doesn't sufficiently drive exploration, that it has lots of potential, and that beautiful things do inspire mental exploration in themselves if you really get it right.