So, the garage studio is up and running. I have a wall full of tools, a drill press, scroll and table saws, and an utterly terrifying 26,000 rpm industrial grinder. First thing I built was a long workbench, the left side of which will be the bicycle/metalworking spot, and the right side of which will be an electronics workstation. The second project is going to be weaving the seats of our dining room chairs (visibe in the background of the pix below). But the third project is up for grabs.
The long-term goal is to build a series of art-making machines that will take the generative designs below and render them in the physical world somehow. I’m leaning towards a robot that can hold pastels.
But before I get to that point, I have to learn a bit about electronics. To that end, I purchased a soldering iron (thanks to Limor for the tip!), one Arduino controller and one Make controller, and a big-ass grab-bag of electronics components from Jameco. I’ll probably start by making some lights blink on and off with my computer, but hopefully (soon? next month? next year?) I’ll be able to run motors and whatnot. Once that happens, god only knows what might emerge from the garage.
My electrotone.com photo gallery is down for the count while I upgrade all my web sites to the latest version of Rails. So now I give you my blog, chronicling my adventures in art-making. For those of you who are new here, enjoy.
One of the advantages of generative art is that when you’re soft on new ideas, you can just play with scale. The latest new stuff is the same algorithm, but ramped up in the size department. I had gone as big as 1200 pixels square (though these are vector art, so they can be printed on paper at any size), but I’ve been playing recently with 2000-3000 px wide images. Here’s a lovely one that’s 2000×800 (detail on the right, as usual).
My cajoling worked! I’ve been asking my landlord Bill about renting the garage since we moved into our house 2 years ago, and he finally assented. He only used the garage to house his wife’s car, and she apparently hasn’t driven it in a couple of years. With my upstairs neighbors’ car going off to Car Heaven last month, there was a vacant space and Bill moved out the station wagon. That left room for me to sweep in and pick up the space for LESS than I was paying for a Uhaul storage cube. Fuckin’ psyched, I am.
My dad recently gave me just about his entire wood shop (after he remarried and moved into Judy’s house), so I’m now setting it up. Mostly woodworking stuff, but a lot of errata that can be applied to metalworking or whatever: grinders, vises, a drill press, what have ya. And it’s IN MY HOUSE. I am a happy man.
Very bummed that I didn’t take a “before” pic, but I’ll post some photos soon. The big stuff (cabinet maker’s bench, mechanic’s chest, the scroll saw) is already in place, thanks to the lovely and gracious Jessica and her pickup (give her some clickthrough love, and hire her if you need cartoons). Much more to come, and with luck, this will prod me to get some of these ideas out of virtual land and into meatspace. Already dreaming of making a Hektor-like painting robot to turn some of these crazy designs into canvases…
