This is a photo/video record of the mobile - bamboo 8 - that I made this summer. (~ July 2018).To fully appreciate the mobile you will need to see it for yourself. It now takes me about 30 minutes to reassemble the mobile and fine tune the balance. I will put bamboo 8 back up again from time to time - if only to watch it move again for myself. But I also hope to show this work.
bamboo 8 cost less than a dollar in materials. The 8 bamboo canes grew in my friends yard. The garden twine comes from Cottin's. The rope for the sky hook was scrounged from the side of the road on a walk. The tools I already had.
The actual time it took to make this mobile was perhaps 15 hours over 3 days, but I could neither conceive nor construct this mobile without years of playing with gravity and balance and experimenting with various materials and ways of balancing and joining things together.
bamboo 8 occupies a space 8 feet deep by 25 feet in diameter. There are eight bamboo canes about 14 feet long wrapped at the approximate balance points with twine. Double loops of twine hold the canes together in their appropriate order. The fine balancing takes a light and careful touch. It all hangs from a sky hook.
To say the least, I remain surprised that I was able to make this particular mobile in my backyard and in such a relatively small amount of time. And it is primarily the movement that amazes me. Even in what appears to be still air, bamboo 8 moves. bamboo 8 is both stable and fragile. It will collapse in stronger winds. And the bundle of bamboo generally rests in the rafters of my garage. I have likely spent as much time reassembling the mobile and watching it move as it took to construct and balance it the first time.
So these are merely photos and videos. Enjoy looking at them as you wish. But whether flower or river or sunset or mobile - or even each other - the physical reality is the 'thing' to see and to experience. We live in space and time - not in the two dimensions of screens.
The full video record on YouTube
1 comment:
very cool. wish I had seen it in action in person.
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