Annet Couwenberg Cleft Sculpture Animation

Annet wanted her sculpture, Cleft, animated, and it took a team to suspend, assemble, and animate it. My job was to figure out how to realize Annet's vision of the motion.

In its original form, Cleft sat on a short pedestal on the ground. But, Annet kept dreaming of it moving, and we talked about it for over a year. With some initial ideas, Annet took it to an engineering class at UMBC in anticipation of her show at the CADVC. They worked on the suspension and initial frame.

In the summer of 2021, Timmie Topoleski built the frame, and worked with me to install the motors and wiring. We had help from some students, and several volunteers (soldering party!).

The final frame was about 15' off the floor, with 15 motors, 15 drivers, 4 power supplies, 4 hand-built circuit boards, 15 limit switches, an Arduino, and a Raspberry Pi. I designed the wiring, circuit-boards, and software: available on github.

Controlling 15 motors and limit-switches, spread out over the 11' diameter frame, was the major challenge. I used shift-registers to send stepper-pulses to the drivers, and shift-registers to read the limit-switches. Tests showed that it was easily fast enough for the movement speeds we expected.

(zoom in to see the motors!)

You can enjoy a panel discussion with the team at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB70n7HTrlY , or turn off the sound and watch the sculpture in the background.

I did some work on an interactive component, and we hope to do more with that in the future. As well, we have to rework the frame to make it shippable to other galleries.