the christmas bulbs!!!!!

I was exploring different possibilities of objects one could use instead of the metal swinging spheres used in the original corporate toy...as I wandered around the pound shop looking for inspiration...I came across these brilliantly brightly coloured ping pong balls... 

i threaded wire through them in order to make a loop which i could later attach some thread to.

i used thin wire...it was actually more fun threading this wire through the ping pong balls than playing with the actual final product!!

made a loop so the thread could be easily attached. (this image reminds me of the big multicoloured bulbs my dad sticks on the tree outside our house every year at christmas..which calls them"christmas lights?!?!"...i beg to differ!!)

"the christams BULBS!!!"

replacing the eggs with ping pong balls!!!

the eggs in the background and the new invention in the front!!!

This video is the only one I have at the moment...I will upload a better one when I get back into college on Monday...it shows the ping pong balls moving but doesn't do the whole "newtons cradle" notion any justice!!! It does work...I swear!!!! 

Playing the game.....

one of the woooden dominoes i had made before hand!

piece in question on the right..hanging at my desk in my studio.

I used the little wooden dominoes I had previously carved out to create this piece (on the right). I dipped one side of the domino in blue acrylic paint and printed it on the page. I started in the left-hand corner. I used the method of playing the actual game of dominoes (i.e joining 2 to 2...3 to 3... 4 to 4 etc) to choose which dominoes to put after each other. I had no particular design or pattern in mind...I just let the dominoes decide for my...through the quick movement of the game. I think I may do more of these using two different colours to represent two people playing the game.

Newton...you brainbox!

I studied physics for the leaving cert and when I was given the theme of Motion and Movement ,Newton laws of motion sprung to mind....

First law: The velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force.

Second law: The acceleration a of a body is parallel and directly proportional to the netforce F and inversely proportional to the mass m, i.e., F = ma.

Third law: The mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear. 

    

I also love the idea of Newtons Cradle...it mesmerism me!
 
The cradle in motion
.I decided to create one that resembles the corporate business toy but not necessarily so polished...so i experimented with different materials and used bamboo sticks and hollow eggs and wire...making it more raw.

                                                                                                

I punctured two holes at either ends of each egg with a needle and blew though the top pushing the egg contents through the bottom into a bowl..making the egg hollow!

I put some wire into the first and last egg to weight it down so when one at the end is lifted and released ,the resulting force travels through the line and pushes the last one upward.  

I had to change the wire as it was too thin and wasn't sturdy enough to hold the eggs in a straight line...i also had to reinforce the bamboo sticks with nails at the base of the stand! 

i drilled holes in the bamboo and insert a stronger wire.

nails drilled through the base of the mdf wood.

experimenting with different types of string...i liked the look of the thicker one but it was the thinner one which worked best..so i used that instead!

The eggs worked well enough...surprisingly!I thought they would be too fragile to bounce off each other...I thought I would have to fill it with glue or make castings of the eggs instead. I expected them to crack at smash on impact but they did not!. You do,however, have to be quiet gentle with them! Maybe I will explore this more in the future and overcome this "problem"!!

Dublin Contemporary inspiration!

This instillation was done by Alan Butler and came under the name of "Futures 11". I was lucky enough to go to THE DUBLIN CONTEMPORARY EXHIBITION with the college yesterday. It was a reproduction oil painting which was put on a rotating motor.i photographed this piece 3 times as it was rotating clockwise....it reminded me of a domino falling.

                                                                               

This motion detecting piece is by Cleary and Connolly ..the colours reminded me of dominoes and so did the fact you could see the ripple effect on the screen...i bet if you pushed dominoes in front of it...the ripple effect would be similar!

How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck...??

After making the A4 dominoes out of the pages of coding paper- I was inspired to make little miniature wooden replicas. I wanted them to be slightly distorted and not exactly the correct height or width of an actual domino. The random patterns made by the coding also inspired me- I wanted to create a tribal design on them. I used lino cutting tools to carve into the MDF wood! I designed them to be wider in relation to the width:height ratio of a stereotypical domino! They were also thinner than "what they should have been" this caused slight problems with stability! I like these little wooden dominoes...I may explore them at a later stage an create some more pieces based on them...!

The annoying coding paper from the printer...

I found this paper...lots of it..in the printer one day!It is the result of images not being properly read by the scanner.  Instead pages and pages of coding gets printed out...usually causing a great deal of annoyance to the person standing waiting for the image to come out of the printer- dominoes also cause a huge deal of annoyance which I have recently found out!! Trying to get them to all co-operate and stand vertically in the pattern you want...proves very ,very difficult..and usually ends with the dominoes being thrown across the room! I liked these pages however...they were very visually interesting , the coding reminded me of the quick movement of the combination of numbers and digits in the movie "The Matrix".   

I made these A4 size paper dominoes on the bus journey home on Friday evening...they were not very complicated to make in comparison to the wire ones I had previously done! They fell very smoothly as I had hoped they would..reflecting the actual movement of dominoes.

The Big Pink- Dominoes