“Bang Goes The Theory presenter Jem Stansfield is attempting to fly a human-powered plane.
Jem designed the plane which works on pedal power and has been doing intense training to prepare himself for the aircraft’s first – and possibly only – flight.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17754246
Great video!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2012/04/bang-human-powered-plane.shtml
Raspberry Pi is a micro computer the size of a credit card, its founder Eben Upton at Cambridge University designed it to be cheap enough to purchase for kids to learn about computers and programming, it can also be used for spreadsheets, word-processing and games and has the capability to play high-definition videos. The small computer retails at only $35 for Model B, which comes with an ethernet connection and $25 for Model A. Its a modular style of marketing a computer whereby the LCD screen, keyboard, mouse and SD card can all be bought as a kit for no more than $100. The computer is also powered from a mobile charger, or can run on 4xAA cells.
Jute is a vegetable fibre that comes from the Corchorus plant (also know as the golden fibre for its colour). India is the largest producer of Jute in the world. The jute is sewn between March and May each year and is harvested in October whereby the stems (which reach a height of up to 4m) of the plants are cut and then soaked in water to loosen the fibres for extraction, this process is known as retting. After the fibres have been extracted they are sun dried and hung ready to be used for packaging, wrapping, sacks, geotextiles- landfill covering, hessian cloths, pulp. Latest experiments even show that the waste produced in jute mills, known as jute caddy can be used effectively as fuel in power plants.
Estimates by the West Bengal Consultancy Organisation (Webcon) show that jute mills in the state together produce more that 70,000 tonnes of jute caddy annually, this wouls generate 7MW of power. ”This would save 45,000 tonnes of coal for power generation,” claimed Asim Mahapatra, managing director of Webcon.
Below are some images by the Japanese artist Naoko Serino who works with Jute fibres to produce delicate and lightweight art.
http://serino.jp/soft_sculpture-en.html
A ladder to the burning clouds
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.
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.
This gallery contains 26 photos.
http://www.youtube.com/michagrau#p/c/141BFDA6E35DF197/3/qUnumytQH8c
The videos are from the workshop I attended in April. This particular video shows Michael Grau’s robot, which basically draws the intersection points along a wooden member as slashes in the right or left direction and writes a code consisting of a number and a letter, so later on when it came down to putting the structure together we knew exactly where and what direction to put the wooden members in. Time was running out so we used cable ties for both constructions. The final structure is a very organic form.
The second construction was created by studying people and their movements on the site at Hooke park, the movements were 3d scanned using a hacked Kinect Xbox (acted as a motion sensor), then points were generated in Rhino to form a point cloud model. The points were joined together with lines forming a voronoi (a volume,form). We then used a robot which took the coordinates of each member from the computer and translated these to the space in the forest, it moved within the perimeter of the site and told us where to position each wooden member, so we cut the wood as we went along and connected each member with an eyehook and a cable tie. Sometimes additional support was required that the computer did not account for, so we just added these. Also in the organic form the material used was not flexible enough to create the rounded shapes, as a result the structure kept breaking in sections and we had to add additional supports.
If we had more time it would have been ideal to test different types of material.
