THE TIME DUNE

Black Light

 

This is my submission for an Art pavilion at the Burning Man Festival. It is principally concerned with the movement of light and water through tubes around the structure, aiming to create an environment that is visually stimulating encouraging reflection and the reemergence of a child like curiosity and fun in exploration. Different coloured fluorescent dyes are added to water housed in a central ‘spire-like’ tower. The water is steadily released from the tank, controlled with IV drip controllers, throughout the festival and weaves its way around the central space. The movement of the water. although controlled, will be subject to sudden internal siphons, air bubbles in u-bends and constantly changing shadows and refractions giving a chaotic nature to the movement to maintain the experience for the participants of the festival. At night the structure takes on a more vigorous life with UV striplights setting off the fluorescence in the water.

At the end of the festival the water tubes will be sealed and cut into small sections that can be given out to Burning Man participants as a memory of their experience.

Below is the animation (already posted previously on this blog) that I created for the submission to demonstrate the experience of the pavilion.

A Ladder to the Burning Clouds

A ladder to the burning clouds

Hanging on

Climbing through the ladder to the burning cloud

A ladder to the burning clouds

Time lapse

Flight of the tetroon (test)

A burning cloud module

Fractured Interstitial Water System

Burning Man Presentation_Kayleigh Dickson

The concept of is primarily based on the purifying and recycling of shower water, plus the evaporation of Grey Water. Fractured Interstitial Water System uses the water from a shower and through a series of thought out cracks filtrates, purifies and re-disperses the water around the shower systems. The programme of recycling the water at the Burning Man Festival informs the architecture by controlling the cracking formation to the preferable form for the programme, the Grey Water cracks vary in depth and scale to suit the change in the needs of the water and allows the grey water to be taken out into the playa for evaporation.
Water is a desirable and limited resource at the Burning Man festival; this programme will reduce the need to remove numerous liters of grey water from the Burning Man site after the festival and allows the concept of showering to be a daily activity rather than once or twice in two weeks.

Flotation Power

The concept of Flotation Power is primarily based around salt and its sustainable uses. Flotation Power uses saltwater as an electrolyte to generate electricity for nightime lighting and as an integral ingredient for flotation therapy. The programme of flotation informs the architecture by requiring a cocoon-like environment with salty, skin-temperature water in which to float, sheltered from the harsh elements, this is provided by natural salt formation.

Flotation therapy offers health benefits. It is well known that relaxing sleep in bed is essential to good health and often the best way to recover from stress and illness. Floating in a flotation therapy tank is even more relaxing. The deep relaxation state achieved allows the body to recover from stress, provides pain relief, stimulates blood flow and releases natural endorphins. It is a mental and physical relaxation therapy. This installation also deals with the issue of sustainable energy generation, so rather than bringing electricity generators to the site it uses a natural resource sourced from the site = saltwater.

Balloonwrap

In reference to economy of materials, rapid deployment, self sufficiency, interactivity and leave no trace aspects of the ten day Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert I have explored vacuumatically prestressed structures (vacuumatics) to create a temporary structure.

Using minimal materials, a Balloonwrap cloud would encourage maximum participation during the construction and throughout the festival. An ephemeral soft cloud like landscape, where participants delight in modifying the shape as well as being able to interact with the structure by lying down, dancing on, climbing and sitting inside the enclosure.

As documented in the film above, Balloonwrap is a vacuumatic structure made using Polythene sheets at 63 microns, 5m x 3.65m, with balloons as the filling. A large scale model here is made rigid enough to span gaps, flexible enough to bend back on itself and strong enough to act as a seat or even a bed.

The material could therefore be used as the floor, wall, roof and seating elements in a continuous loop for any installation with the added benefit that it would have good thermal insulation as well as solar reflective potential (using silver/white reflective balloons/opaque film).

The main advantages of Balloonwrap are form flexibility and adaptability. An important factor that determines its adaptability is the flexibility control. Without any negative pressure (0% vacuum) the balloons inside the polythene enclosure possess hardly any consistency and are able to flow freely inside this skin. By increasing the amount of vacuum pressure the consistency of the balloons gradually increases, resulting in a more or less plastic behaviour of the structure. This enables the structure to be shaped while keeping its newly given form. Finally, in fully deflated state (100% vacuum) the Balloonwrap becomes rigid, with balloons used as a filling in my experiments, it is possible to climb the rigid load-bearing structure and sit comfortably! The reversibility of this rigidifying process enables the Balloonwrap to be re-shaped all over again.

Solar balloon experiments

The video shows a tetroon shaped balloon made from 20 bin bags, measuring approximately 7mx3.5m folded out, and once inflated with air the balloon was about 4m in diameter. The balloon reached a height of about 25-35m. I found it rose quicker when released from a height (the tetroon was released from my loft bathroom window). I also carried out several other tests with different forms (and some with a weight) such as a cellular tetroon, UFO, double bulb, cuboid and a tube, but I found the tetroon form the most stable in the air, it also reached the greatest height, was the largest balloon I constructed and used the entire bin bag during construction.

Double bulb (20 bin bags)

UFO (20 bin bags)

Mini Tetroon (9 bin bags)

Cellular Tetroon (29 bin bags with a small weight 226g of chocolate)Unfortunately this balloon got caught on my neighbours roof, but I am confident that it can work again.

Cuboid (6 bin bags)

Tube (7 bin bags)

Tetroon (20 bin bags)

A Pneu Story

This animation tells the story of an autonomous pneumatic landscape emerging from the ground. The story begins deep in the ocean where the first pneus forms came into existence, overtime they evolved and reached the surface of the water to continue life on land, where they became animated by the changing environment that surrounded them.

I used Cinema 4D and After Effects(and some Trapcode Particular).

This was my final animation for my digital representation unit at the University of Westminster.

The images below are my chronograms and storyboard from my logbook.

 

HOME MADE 3D SCANNER

This home made 3D scanner uses a webcam, a laser line, a calibration backdrop and DAVID laserscanner software to create accurate and detailed 3D scans. The system must be calibrated first with no model present. Once this has been done the model can be placed in front of the backdrop and the laser line passed over its surface. The camera is able to read the distortions of the laser line as it passes over the surface and DAVID converts this information into a 3D mesh. Multiple scans can be made from different angles, which are then automatically aligned and fused by DAVID. Meshes can be exported in multiple formats, in this case as .obj for further editing in Rhino and rendering with VRay.

SAND DUNE SOLIDIFICATION THROUGH CREST POURING

This solidified sand structure is created by pouring a mixture of sand and saturated sodium salt solution over the crest of the dune. As the liquid builds along the crest it creates new channels which pour towards the base of the dune. Once the poured mixture has solidified through the crystallisation of the salt the bulk of the dune can be blown away, simulating the migration of dunes in deserts. This reveals an interior volume within the sand structure.