I thought this Duchamp interview was great, never heard him speak or really saw pictures of him before. Really he just seems sort of like a “regular guy” to me here.
While we’re here, this is an Ed Ruscha thing talking about one of the Duchamp pieces that’s referenced in the above interview:
Also, since we’re sharing/saving videos here, this larger history of Dada was well worth the watch (at least at 2x speed anyway). Duchamp appears in this as well:
I discovered yesterday an artist who has been around for forever who I had never even heard of, Ed Ruscha, and whose artwork often consists of amazing combinations of text and graphic style images. As an art school drop-out, I’m shocked he never came up, but better late than never. Here are a selection of good videos about him and interview footage. Lots of stuff resonates with me here, especially for an upcoming project I’ll unveil sometime soon.
This one is new to me, despite being a kid in the 1980s, the Armatron, a robotic arm from Radio Shack. Here are some videos I’ve had open in tabs for weeks now, so offloading here for safe-keeping:
Apparently despite having some minimal electronic parts, the device is mostly mechanical.
There was also a mobile version:
This video shows the guts of how the mechanism and gearbox work:
All in all, seems like a really cool toy! I wish I had one in good working order to experiment with as a drawing tool.
Was doing some reading on claw machines and their mechanisms, and discovered that probably the first historical example of this machine was called the Erie Digger and was all mechanical, no electricity required. Here is I think one of that original design in action:
I believe this shows the same type of machine but also the mechanism and the controller being operated:
And this looks like a closeup of the mechanism:
Not sure how easy all of that would be to pull off in wood at the scale I can do it, but some useful references here no doubt for down the road when I get to that.
Shorter term, I will definitely try to do a variation of Yowawerts on Youtube’s cardboard claw hand:
And possibly their all cardboard complete claw machine:
From the video description:
You don’t need to use any complex materials such as syringes, motors, wires, programs, or other hard-to-find objects because for this homemade machine, you will only need cardboard, strings / yarn, skewers / BBQ sticks, cutting tools like scissors & cutter, sticking materials like glue and glue gun…
I’m learning to love barbecue skewers too.
Not in English, but a really great and very clear demo video of different kinds of cams and resulting motions in wood crank automata:
What I’ve found is that while you can watch and sort of understand these things with your eyes, until you’ve actually tried to build them in reality, you don’t really get it.
Found this kinetic sculpture the other day by Christian Werdin that I thought was really cool, called Three Scribes:
Embedded in this Boingboing post about it is another video which shows for a few seconds at the end the mechanisms under the table, which I’d like to find in more detail, personally.
Here’s a longer piece about Werdin, but it’s only in German unfortunately (for me). You can at least see some of his work and workshop if, like me, you don’t speak the language.
As I continue on this train of trying to figure out how to build a low tech human powered version of the Elephant Robotics exoskeleton, I made an important discovery about historical robot types. My working definition of “robot” is of course somewhat broad, and some might argue that what I found is not really itself robotic… but I don’t care about that.
The more polite modern name for my discovery is a remote manipulator, and the older less politically correct name for it is a master-slave manipulator. They are also called waldos after a Heinlein short story. From the Wikipedia, as to origins around hazardous material handling:
In 1945, the company Central Research Laboratories was given the contract to develop a remote manipulator for the Argonne National Laboratory. The intent was to replace devices which manipulated highly radioactive materials from above a sealed chamber or hot cell, with a mechanism which operated through the side wall of the chamber, allowing a researcher to stand normally while working.
The result was the Master-Slave Manipulator Mk. 8, or MSM-8, which became the iconic remote manipulator seen in newsreels and movies, such as The Andromeda Strain or THX 1138.
For reference, here is the THX 1138 scene, though I barely remember that movie:
Note that a remote manipulator is distinct from a glovebox, like we see Homer Simpson using. In a glovebox, you stick your arms in, and they are shielded, but you’re using your own actual hands to manipulate objects. In remote manipulators – waldos – you are not. The action is at a distance, which is part of what makes this an intriguing thing to try to DIY.
I found a number of other videos on this topic of remote or telemanipulator systems, as they are also called. Or “Slave Hands” as they are called in the 1960 video:
Curiously, many of the promo materials for this technology often include the robotic hands lighting a cigarette for a woman, or serving her tea. In the one above, she’s even made to drink from the tea cup, which is a level of trust I would probably not have here were I them. The whole trend of that kind of imagery seems like a weird scientist sublimated puppetmaster/beauty & the beast erotic fantasy undercurrent somehow that I haven’t quite delved into, but definitely appears to be a “thing.” (It’s also on display here in another form in the 1948 GE Master-Slave Manipulator on Cybernetic Zoo – which has tons of related material, by the way).
A similar video from 1956:
1972, different form factor, but same basic idea:
Here’s a more modern demo of this type of technology from 6 years ago:
This heavy duty remote manipulator for large heavy objects is also amazing:
Okay, so the above is all well and good for industrial scale work, but I was hard pressed to find too many DIY examples of remote manipulators, with something that I might try to clone for home use. The below video demonstrates the closest analogue I’ve found to what I might try and build for the purposes of painting with it.
You can see the finished version of that My-Nuke coin operated nuclear reactor game machine by Tim Hunkins here.
For my purposes, the iteration he has around this form seems most relevant, labelled as Mark 2, starting around 0:32 in the video, here’s a still:
Just eyeballing it, that doesn’t look all that complicated… just some bar linkages to transmit forward/back motion. Unclear how the rest works exactly for the side to side motion – he kinda swings/rotates the arm? I can’t tell from the screen capture exactly how the grabber works, but now that I understand cable controls (kinda), that shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out. Anyway, a number of questions left here, but that’s the best simple DIY-style example I could find, and that gives me plenty of fuel for my own prototypes in this direction.
I made today a small experimental upgrade to the “Grabbit-1” prototype all-wood robot grabber hand thing. For lack of a better name, I’m calling it the grabbit-flapper-1. More images and a video at the Imgur gallery here. (You can also see the ohara controllers in the background, from a separate unrelated build.)
Well, okay, there are two upgrades here, one is putting those plastic eyes onto the grabbit claw. The second is putting a flapping wing mechanism, cable-controlled, connected to a little hook at the bottom which is used to actuate the wings. The video linked above shows the best overview of how the mechanism is constructed.
I went through a lot of YouTube vids at high speed to figure out how to get the motion that I wanted, and I finally found it in this video of a scale model of Da Vinci’s ornithopter. (Or zoom in for a close up here.)
I haven’t been able to find a good reference from Leonardo’s actual drawings to verify this as a match, but the mechanism works – even if mine is extremely quick and janky, like all the rest of these experiments while I learn how the mechanisms work, and how to piece them together without too much expense or hassle.
I had intended for mine to actually send the wire to the back with the handle of the mouth wire too, but it wasn’t working with the tubing that I had, and preferred to get something simpler that works in all cases instead. And the action of this one as it is with the wings feels good in the hands.
Accidentally discovered something very interesting while messing around with the Photoshop remove tool, which on certain settings uses generative AI to replace out whatever you select with it.
In this case, was just playing around removing stuff from a photo of our living room, and saw that the tool was inventing paintings or posters that don’t exist:
That one in the corner, I zoomed in on and went through a few AI upscalers with and got this altogether vague still “detail” shot of:
It’s not on its own the greatest image ever seen, but there’s something spooky about how it looks and its ultimate provenance as an AI re-inventing my physical surroundings… almost has a ‘paranormal’ quality to me somehow. I had the idea of like, could I take these AI-imagined figments, and then do like I did with my Matisse copy and make human-done reproductions? Either as faithfully as possible to the original, or else with some enhancements by the human artist?
Here are some other examples. This photo was from about halfway through last year, and represented all the paintings I’d done lately (minus two in another room).
The funny part is, this original real photograph had a couple gaps where there was empty wall space. So I went in to those two areas (marked with arrows in image above) and used the Remove tool in Photoshop on them, and it invented these two other paintings that it thinks look natural there.
Eerily, the one on the left actually shares a lot of characteristics with a paintings which I did end up doing later on, this one, the Head of Hygiea:
Photoshop got the color scheme more or less exactly right, a good bit of the overall “vibe” but it just wasn’t able to see into the subject matter. But otherwise, I’d almost call that “prescient.”
Here’s one last one for the road, two paintings in storage in my small basement studio from over a decade ago (depicted at bottom half of image below). And alongside you can see the progressively extended painting that the Photoshop Remove tool created over a few rounds of trying.
The forms and mark-making on these AI-interpolations don’t quite ring true with my actual painted works, and they aren’t quite snazzy enough yet for me to simply want to replicate them manually. But these are just early accidents and experiments. There is much hyperspatial painting to be explored and uncovered here still.
I appreciated these comments from Dave Winer about/against Bluesky’s having needlessly reinvented many wheels when it comes to web technologies in its pursuit of whatever. I’m not a Bluesky user, but this is absolutely an epidemic disease I’ve seen working as a product manager these past few years in crypto/blockchain…
BTW, in defense of Matt Mullenweg and the culture of the developer community he built over the last 20 years, for better or worse, they don’t do what Bluesky did. They look for prior art and implement it and they don’t deprecate. They’re still running the APIs we invented for blogging before WordPress even existed. The philosophy is “Let’s not argue about decisions made a long time ago, because we want interop.” People have all kinds of harsh things to say about their leadership, but unless you’re a developer you don’t understand that the reason it works is that they have a different code for their code, the only way we get interop is by not re-inventing. There are two competing ways to do things in tech. The blogging world has been taken over by the re-inventors, like the Bluesky people. They make a nice product, but honestly they don’t reallllly want us to work with them, or we wouldn’t be having this friction.
On the crypto side, for all the talk of decentralization, what I’ve seen is that the vasy majority of those projects just end up leaning on AWS in the end. That, of course, and a lot of needlessly complex architecture for rewards that are not always things people need or want. But no, I’m not cynical…
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