Showing 4 posts tagged aluminum
Brass, aluminum, stainless steel, and copper turn into more than just materials under the care and engineering of kinetic artist Mark Galt, who made a walking mechanical woman, above, and man, below:
There are more gears and kinetic sculptures moving around in the archives.
via La Boite Verte.
How is an Etch A Sketch made? MAKE: Inventions host Steve Hoefer gives a bit of historical background on the classic toy, and then, with the original patent and some trial and error, tries to make his own.
via 22 words.
On older buildings, it’s not too uncommon to see the crowning touch of an ornamental weather vane — a rotation device which indicates the wind’s direction. But what happens when a bunch of weather vanes are put together on the same surface? That’s the question that American artist Charles Sowers answers with Windswept, a kinetic installation of 612 aluminium weather vanes placed on the facade of San Francisco’s Randall Museum — and revealing surprising results, as you can see in this video from Dezeen.
As you can see, the spinning blades don’t uniformly point in the same direction as one might expect, but rather show smaller diverse patterns and paths of the breeze. Says Sowers: ”Windswept seeks to transform a mundane and uninspired architectural façade (the blank wall of the theatre) into a large scale aesthetic/scientific instrument, to reveal information about the interaction between the site and the wind.”
From Treehugger. Thanks, @mamagotcha.
More kinetic sculptures and more wind in the archives.
It’s not magic, kiddo. It’s science!
Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is a colorless, odorless gas that is more dense than air at 6.12 g/L (at sea level). This density is why you can pour it into a glass container and float a light-weight aluminum “boat” on its gas “sea.” Watch this demonstration at the Physikshow of the University of Bonn!
via Quora.
