I arranged for table space and asked my techie friends to bring their old electronic stuff and soldering irons. I brought a piece of plywood for the base, an old PC power supply, a box of circuit cards, dead answering machines, little brass tubes, solder, hot melt glue, a soldering iron, a hot melt glue gun, plyers, wire cutters, a dremel and the Miniboard from the refrigerator. (The Miniboard is back home monitoring the refrigerator.)
I glued a CD-ROM to a muffin fan and stuck it on a computer card, I glued the computer card to another computer card at an angle. I connected the muffin fan to the PC power supply and gave other people encouragement. The sculpture started to grow. I left for a few hours.
When I returned the sculpture had many moving parts. A broken radar detector clicked and chirped, its lights moved when you touched the wire that said "love meter". Someone took apart a dead 40 Mbyte 5 1/4 inch harddisk with 6 platters. The platters were added to the sculpture, as was the head assembly. The CD-ROM on the muffin fan broke and was replaced with a pair of harddisk platters. The guts from an answering machine ran quite a few parts threw rubber bands. I planted the seeds of the sculpture, but it was growing by itself.
Actually there were usually at least 2 people working on it as long as the room was open. Sometimes there were so many people, you couldn't get close to it.
Chad made a switch out of some bits of wire and brass. Something off the answering machine would hit the switch every 5 seconds or so. The switch ran other parts that spun and twitched. Someone else added a 2 inch mirror ball to the answering machine. You could switch the answering machine to fast forward or reverse and the mirror ball would go faster. The radar detector got less sensitive after a power interruption. Someone hooked it to Chad's switch so the lights would blink up and down again.
The PC power supply handled short circuits very well. It would shut off the power until it was turned off and back on. This was good, because it got shorted many times. I saw a few of these and thought that my Miniboard would not survive being worked on by so many skilled and unskilled people. I made the decision to not actually connect the Internet Kinetic Sculpture to the Internet. Sorry about that.
I'm designing an Internet Kinetic Sculpture Interface. I want to use a clear plexiglass box with a barrier strip for connections. The plexiglass will allow people to see the computer on the inside, without making it susceptible to stray powered wires. I plan on optically isolating the serial port and each input and output bit. Each interface bit will be designed to tolerate moderate stupidity. Hopefully only one bit at a time will be destroyed by extreme stupidity.
I also will announce the sculpture farther in advance and ask people to bring microswitches and relays. There were quite a few things that would have been nicer with easy to use switches. We had one good micro switch. It was triggered by a cam connected to a dead floppy drive. It made several interesting things happen. With several microswitches, the interesting things could happen in sequence, not all at once.
If you saw the sculpture, please send me your thoughts Mail paulh@hamjudo.com or tell me the URL for your review.
If you helped, many thanks for making it a successfull sculpture.