And on and on...

It's now nine month since I last busked out my tensegrities. While I accidentally sold a few pieces this year, I'd love the business to pick up again. Still, I took part of Polymer Dreams Lab installation in Coburg, and build a bit bigger.

I still haven't organised better camera gear, the mobile phone camera has many limitations, as well as my ageing IT gear. This made me a bit lazy in maintaining this site, as it has become a bit tedious to add decent photos in an acceptable time frame.

Goodbrew Vector Equilibrium

One of the first bigger pieces is based on the 24 strut cuboctahedron aka vector equilibrium. The struts are brush painted, an area where I can still improve my skills. The structure has survived some drops of a few metres and still hangs out in a large warehouse.

Garden decoration

I came across some nice looking broom handles, with a hole on one side, which I could quickly convert into a 4-strut tetra. I used the pre-existing holes for a continuos inner tendon, and guestimated the length for the outer tendons on the first shot. Unlike larger tetras with slightly flexible struts, the result behaves very sturdy and without the tendency to collapse through its centre. It's now an eye catcher in our front yard, surrounded with two brugmansias.

Eclectic tetra

I rediscovered some dowels I prepared for my very first tensegrity builds, when I still deployed hooks to secure the strings. The dowels probably had the larger diameter I used for small-size models, while the additional 12 sticks through the centre have about the smallest diameter I used. Unless I get another dremel, I can't prepare similar small diameter struts anymore, but combination of materials with different girths in larger scale are well worth contemplating.

Another lucky find were nicely carved bamboo chopsticks. Finding the right length for this one took much longer than building the larger version garden decoration, I nevertheless like the small version a lot.

I sourced some old trampoline springs, and a friend cut some old pipes to lengths for me. I totally underestimated the strengths of the springs, and had to settle down with a slightly asymmetric version of an icosahedron shape. I haven't dared to try to collapse the structure, as I realised how easily working with heavy struts and high tension can lead to serious injury. The springs and the weight allow any impulse to reverberate through the structure for a long time, hitting struts and springs produces quite some interesting sounds. 

Steampunk tensegrity

As the metal started rusting slightly, I decided to give the dull grey with bits of rust a colourful makeover. Different perspectives show now different colours dominating, yet I'm not too sure yet how long it'll survive outdoors.

Thingamabobs

I took up residency with my Magical Thingamabobs nearly a year ago, and many things happened in the open air shop in Melbourne's prestigious CBD since then. I encountered all four seasons now, and could observe the change in angle of the sun towards our planet.

Some people claim that my art work isn't 'emotional', which might hold true to a certain degree. Nevertheless, I experienced the gamut of fear, anger, grief, love, sadness and worry while patiently and persistently doing my work.

The 6 strut icosahedron and the 12 strut octahedron remain my most popular objects, but there's some shapes I discontinued, and a new set of objects to reassemble each time around. As my camera equipment doesn't work too well, I probably missed the opportunity to document some objects I haven't build since then.

Close encounter - 6 strut tetrahedron

I noticed that reassembling some of the objects creates some wear, and a loss of tension. The model above has reworked to have single-string connections to each corner. The 20cm Pars inspired tetrahedron has been painted a little bit to look even more distinct.

Japanese Butterfly - 12 strut tetrahedron

I love the shape of the 24 strut cuboctahedron, and build some colour variation with it. While four colours bring out the four intersection double triangles in the structure, using black as only colour works aesthetically well.

Checkerboard - 24 strut cuboctahedron

An icosahedron with suspended wireframe tetrahedron act as the current 'eye-catcher' for the front row. The transport made the doubled strings a bit weaker, the suspended centrepiece brings it back into good shape. 

Captured tetra - 6 strut icosahedron with suspended tetrahedron

The dodecahedron gets really wobbly as 30 strut structure. I found two variations for it, though. The first one consists of an 6 strut icosahedron, joined like the one above. By connecting the ends of the parallel sticks the strings outline 12 pentagonal faces. The other variation starts as 5 strut prism, with five more sticks outside the girth of it. 

10 strut dodecahedron

Painting the end of the sticks black adds another dimension to the structure, and works well for many basic shapes. The model below has already found a new home, but as I enjoy playing with this one most, it will have a rebirth soon.

12 strut octahedron with elastic and non-elastic string

The amount of 'un-playable' objects increases. The latest one of those offers plenty of potential for all sort of variation. The outer tendons shape a tetrahedron, the sticks are attached to its corner and miss each other in the central hub made of four tendons.

Black flag post 4 strut x-module based tetrahedron

I have two of 4 strut pyramids on display - the 15 cm version above, and a 30 cm one. And some more at home, one version with aluminium tube as struts. I want to explore whether I can use these tetrahedral modules to build a star tetrahedron, that might be a nice project for a rainy day.

I took some of the photos here from the blog Hello Mrs. Morris, who wrote a nice article about me and my work.

More rip-offs

The success with rebuilding the tetrahedron based on Marcelo Pars' idea motivated me to do more as yet unexplored structures. There's still some challenges I want to take on, watch this space.

Caged rainbow (18 strut tensegrity cube)

The simplest of my new structures just adds 6 struts to a cube with changing chirality along its corners. Similar to a dice, where opposite sides add up to seven, colours oppose each other of each side. Snelson managed to build an x-module in a way that outlined a tetrahedron, I was surprised how well my guestimation for the different tendon lengths worked out.

Tetra ala Snelson

It might look better when slotted into a base, so that only one strut connects to the ground, similar to Earthlon, which shows the 'ascension skylon' out of Burkhardt's collection of structures, and turns it around.

Earthlon

I drafted Earthlon with elastic strings. but it gained much stability with less elastic tendons. It has only little movement, nevertheless looks quite surprising.

Polarised canary

Polarised canary took quite some time to get together, and probably the tendons holding the upright strut could be a bit shorter. The same concept should work with three struts on either end, and looks a bit like a beam capable of absorbing shock along its length.

Homage to Pars

When I came across the website of Marcelo Pars, a Dutch tensegrity artist, I knew that my explorations wouldn't find an end soon. The site looked a bit different at the time, but had already some fantastically inspiring pieces on display. I had the impression that he builds models on a larger scale than I do, and much more with 'redundant' struts that I explored so far.

Besides exploring basic geometry, he managed to give his objects a solidity in appearance (and potentially in mechanical behaviour) that eluded me. I totally enjoy the ethereal appearance of some of my own structures, and managed to resist the call for more solid struts.

Parsed Rastafarian (12 strut tetrahedron)

While I consider the tetrahedron (in some educated believe in Fuller that the tetrahedron comprises the smallest unit in universe) a very appealing shape, most people exposed to my work prefer the icosahedron when it comes to 6 strut structures.

Parsed Rastafarian (sitting on a tetrahedral face)

While playing with the Java tensegrity viewer by Bob Burkhardt, a pioneer of constructing tensegrity structures, I realised have easy it should be to build a 12 strut tetrahedron like Pars did. I had a small colourful tetrahedron lying around, and decided to transform it. 

Parsed Rastafarian

The tetrahedron 'proves' that one and one add up to four, and it hides 3 pairs of orthogonal edges in it. Three colours suffice to show this twisted pair of edges. While I love many visual aspects of the small version, it's tricky to balance it on all corners, and the relative large diameter in relation to the length of the struts brings the struts nearly into contact.

Homage to Marcelo Pars (12 strut tetrahedron)

The proximity of the struts could easily be changed by upsizing. The corners are held together in a single spot, I'm tempted to connect the corners to the center. Well, as the first emanation with 60 cm struts already has quite a large prestress, I might delay this idea until the next build. 

Homage to Marcelo Pars

The larger build unveiled the space in between the intricate weaving patterns in the center of the sculpture. I'm still hesitant to play it hard, I had some accidents during the build and it feels so taut that I fear to break some of the flimsy struts used.

Genesis revisited (4 strut x-modul)

My attempts to scale the classic 4 strut x-module up didn't succeed. The 30 cm strut version, very taut with only nylon string, can easily be held in balance by slotting into a relatively heavy base. I hope my lungs didn't take damage from drilling the fibreglass base...

Double plus good

Using two colours for the tendons allows to show the 'centre' and 'periphery' of the x-module. Using two colours for the four struts will enhance the polarity of the struts, could be fun be find out how a chain of x-modules behaves. I did this before, very early in my tensegrity exploration, certainly worth doing again.

Pented up

The small 30 strut dodecahedron I had lying around didn't really invite for playing, so I thought in combination with a basis its wobbly qualities come into good use.