Mechatronic Art and Music

These are the four final projects from the 2020 "Mechatronic Art & Music" course. Each student was tasked with opened ended assignment of designing and creating their own electro-mechanical device related to their personal creative practice. Carl Burgin, Trevor Bock, Charles Danner, Cy Krafft & Kai-Luen Liang

Kai-Luen Liang

Tomorrow There Will Be Wind ( Automatic Windchimes )
A performance of playing an Arduino controlled set of wind chimes.
Vibration motors are activated through a motor driver creating divisions and
polyrhythms based on various “states.” First iteration prototype with beer
bottle activation.


 

Trevor Bock

4-Note Bottle Blowing Instrument

I have always loved the angelic sound that is produced by blowing into an empty glass
bottle. The combination of wind noise and the ringing sine wave tone that resonates out of the
bottle creates a fascinating timbre that is impossible to perfectly replicate digitally. What if you
could mechanically create this sound and produce beautiful melodies to perform with it? This is
what inspired me to create the 4-Note Bottle Blowing Instrument. This device contains four
small fans attached to DC motors mounted in a specific way to effectively blow air into each of
the bottles. This causes them to resonate and create a fairly loud sine tone. Each bottle is
individually tuned by raising and lowering the amount of water inside them. Using an Arduino,
the instrument will then perform a sequence of notes by fading the fans in and out from left to
right. This allows musicians to tune each bottle accordingly and create any four part melody
they desire.


 

Cy Krafft

This work in progress was inspired by a love of old school liquid light shows and a fascination
with the precise engineering of the inside of a moving head. The goal is to repurpose the
internal mechanisms from used Clay Paky Alpha Spot and Alpha Wash fixtures to create an
animating liquid light show in the beam of the fixtures.
I began with the Alpha Wash fixtures due to the less complex internal layout. However, due to
the limited range of beam effects in the fixture, the color wheels were my first choice for
modification. The challenge with the color wheels was adapting the rotational movement of the
color wheels into the vertical movement of a plate.
The first iteration of this design is made of two clear discs connected by a silicone tube to create
a sealed container that is then filled with the dyed oil and water. The two discs can then be
oscillated against each other through the use of a ridged gear on the inside of the metal plates
holding the discs. This creates the fluid movement associated with traditional liquid light shows.
In addition, the entire mechanism can be moved in and out of the beam to add or remove the
effect. The prototype of this iteration is still in development


 

Charles Danner


 

Yunni Lin

The Process A short film documenting the day to day training of dancers in the studios.

Carla Lopez

Water as a cleansing, invigorating, distortional, and transitional space. Motel pools as portals. Coloring and Layout Assistance – Lula Ochoa and Emily Malone My Swimmers – Lula Ochoa, Audrey Bandrowski, James Holsten, and Arius Ziaee Additional Camera Work – Savannah Perry Music by 11ai – www.ilai.link Thank you to the Calarts Risograph Printing Techs, especially […]

Lorelei Acuna

Indigarb Fast fashion is the world’s second largest polluter, emitting 10% of all carbon emissions and is dumped into lands and oceans all over the world. In Our compilation of video and photography come together to evoke empathetic response in our viewers. By seeing humans absorbed in plastic, we mirror the way our Earth and […]

Socks Whitmore

Quarantine Acoustics When Jacob’s estranged sister Ashley asks him to reprise a role from his past, the two must come to terms with their relationship to his younger ‘female’ self in order to save their own. “Pass” is a queer one act musical in development. It had a staged reading on January 26, 2020 in […]

Joy Chan

14 days in the lockdown April, I was locked up in a central quarantine accommodation. 14 days with the extraction of fresh air and the earth, the only approach for me to connect with the loving world is the peephole in my room door and a locked up window. As I stay, I start to […]

Ward Melnikoff

Return Of The Radiolarian After a 20 year pause, my Radiolarian Landscapes are returning. http://wardmelnikoff.com/

MAHEDI ANJUMAN

Suffocation My artworks respond to the psychological impact of action and reaction (Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion). I like to think of this law in metaphorical terms beyond the literal mathematical implications. We exist in a constant state of action and reaction – every being is psychologically reacting to every action around that. […]

Christine Lee

Happy Headroom “Happy Headroom” was part of my mid-residency show titled “Living Threads” in February 2020. The immersive installation consisted of 4-channel video and sculptures. In this video, my mom and I perform rituals as a visceral process to create a dialogue between changing states of self and site. Hair, simultaneously dead and living, functions […]