The Progress

Part 1

The Digital Fabrication

We accidentally discovered that mylar needles glue to a stretchy string can have very beautiful movements and surprising behavior. Especially when pulling the string, rotating the string, and blowing wind at it, the reflection of light as the mylar needles move makes very mesmerizing effects. We glue 30 mylar needles to each of the 15 strings together in perfect order and after some pulling and turning of the string, order shapes became random. The more you interact with it, the more random it becomes. In the end, many needles fell down from the string and create this feeling of the decay from order to entropy.

This video is showing the accidental discovery of the mesmerizing effects of these materials (mylar needles glue to a stretchy string).

How to mass produce this:

To let the needles stay in place after cutting them from the big sheet of mylar, we print one skewer together by leaving a line connecting every needle. But the laser doesn’t do what we want.

Then we try the vinyl cutter.

Quick, nice and clean.

Glue them to the string one by one

Glue them to the string together by putting a layer of clear plastic paper that has holes that match the position of the needles.

Finally done with cutting and glueing

Put them in a black box.

Getting the first one placed into the box successfully.

This video is showing how hard it is to put the string through the tiny hole in the acrylic.

All 15 strings put into the box in 5 rows and 3 columns. Adding lightings.

PART 2

Mechanize with Voice Interaction

The second part of the project is to mechanize the decay from order to entropy process. We experiment with adding different kinds of motors to the end of the strings and see how the movement goes. With servo motors, the movement is pulling, while with dc motors, the movement is rotating. We use a microphone to detect human voice as an input to the Arduino and the movement is responding to the volume of the human’s voice. So you can “talk” to the mylar needles and see it become more and more random with the interaction over time.