Comment

View Video

Spring Driven
Kinetic Art

Limited Edition of 150
Size: 37"h x 55"w x 8"d
Power Source: negator spring
Approximate Run Time: 2 hours; Price $1395
Available only at galleries

The idea for Sky Dance came to me when I had both the Focus and Quest sculptures on the testing wall at the same time. Could I make a random "floating" sculpture with a simple central mechanism like the one I had developed for Focus? What would the motion be like?

A year and several prototypes later the result is Sky Dance. I'm very pleased with this sculpture. It has random, straight line and floating motion as well as some interesting overlapping optical patterns.

The biggest challenge with Sky Dance is showing all it does with an animation or video! Each patterning cycle, the time between "kicks" from the spring, is about three minutes long. Each cycle is different because it depends on the relative location and motion of the fan-shaped wheels when the "kick" happens.

The animation shows elements of one of my favorite pattern cycles, the fan shaped wheels move in opposite directions giving the "bird" piece a straight line motion. Eventually the back wheels slows down and starts rocking. The animation loops after about 30 seconds so it only shows a glimpse of what really happens.

I'm able to show a little more of the motion on the web video page because I cut out portions of the video and condensed a cycle into about a minute of video.