Hello Everyone! I hope all of you who observe the holiday we just experienced here in the US had a good one. We had a lovely time with the in-laws and a very low stakes meal consisting of delightful readymade dishes from Whole Foods.
T. and I dropped of his grandma and grandpa at South Station on Saturday and so I took it as a good time to bring my Smallish Works painting to Bromfield. That show opens next week and should be a good one. I got be on the jury for the show, which is an interesting experience. If you are an artist, and you submit to juried exhibitions, you should try to get on a jury sometime just to see what it’s like. Anyway, we met up with my friend the artist Melinda Cross and did a little bit of gallery hopping, but T., being three and a half, lost interest in looking at art after about two and a half galleries and spent much of his time running up and down the various ramps and stairs in the courtyard at 450 Harrison Ave. It was fun but sort of dashed my dream of taking him to First Fridays. At least for now.
I sure have been buying a lot of stuff for what I’ve been thinking of as my motor project. I bought some lazy Susan bearings, some NEMA 17 vibration dampers, flange mounts, more steppers, and stepper drivers. I borrowed a Pololu Tic stepper driver from work and got a stepper moving with it and it is so quiet and buttery smooth compared to the Raspberry Pi hat I got from Adafruit. It’s kind of a shame because the drive costs three times as much and only drives one motor (the hat drives two), but wouldn’t you know it Pololu is having a sale so I bought some of those as well. I love Adafruit but I think it’s going to be really important for these things to be quiet.
I’m getting more excited about this project, and it’s starting to take form in my head what I’m going to try. One idea is to do a layer of lattice-like patterning that rocks slowly back in forth over patterns that create visual interference, but the effect of the motion will be subtle such that the viewer will not be sure the motion is happening and will be drawn in to figure out what’s going on. Anyway, that’s a goal!