Wave Machine
This kinetic art piece used CNC machining, 3D printing, laser cutting, and aluminum casting, so both fun to make and hypnotic to watch.
Electrical Hazards
I was a physicist from 1984-2007 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where, in October of 2005 there was a serious electrical accident. An electrician plugged a 480 volt circuit breaker accidentally into a dead short and it turned into a plasma ball that burned him over a large portion of his body. The lab was shut down for safety cleanup for months. I made this installation to recognize the accident and its consequences. The electrician survived.
Plasma cylinder
This is a plasma experiment, where the plasma vessel is immersed in mineral oil inside a large glass cylinder, so that the external surface of the vessel disappears.
Bathtub neon
Jacob Sisk is a longtime friend and son of even longer time friend Peter Sisk.
Jake became the head of a new innovation lab for a large Swiss bank in San Francisco, and commissioned me to make a piece of neon art for the lab. Jake has a tattoo of Tomi Ungerer’s Arson Twitch in a bathtub on his arm, and his assistant Jacqueline and I came up with the idea to put that tub together with the Zurich lion and the California bear, in a tub together, bubbling up with ideas.
The piece is 4’x 4’, constructed by Bill Concannon in Crockett, CA, and is installed in Jake’s lab.
Practical Poetry Machine
Poems are written on a cloth ribbon that is pulled from a spool, around one of the big wheels, through the mirrors, around the other big wheel, and onto a takeup spool.
Pulling is done by a Genevan mechanism that allows one line of text to rest for a couple of seconds before pulling the next line in.
The brochure highlights these points:
Simple – only 6 moving parts.
Easy to use – training takes only a few hours
All electric – much quieter than steam or diesel
Portable – no draft animals required, can be towed
Compact – easily fits into a single room
Versatile – any style of poem, any language, any poet
Safe – depending on the type of poetry you read
Labor Saving – save up to 50% of the effort required to read poetry
Rules and regulations
I started writing poetry back at Stanford; this one was printed in ceramic clay by Jana, and mounted at the gates of our garden at our house, Camp Shasta.
Plasma kaleidoscope
I met plasma artist Ed Kirshner in the early 2000s, and he and I built a plasma kaleidoscope for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, where it was on display until the museum moved from the Palace of Fine Arts to Pier 15 in San Francisco in 2013. The kaleidoscope is now in the Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles.
The kaleidoscope is a cabinet with mirrored internal walls with a plasma vessel at the bottom. A viewer sees many copies of this vessel, as though standing on a rounded hill covered with plasma flowers.
Ziophane Series Seventeen Plasmadoid
2016, now in a private collection in Woodside.
The Pyrex vessel was blown by Adams and Chittenden Scientific Glass, one block from our shop in Berkeley.
Mineral oil, plasma
Plasma Globe
I have worked with Mark Pauline’s Survival Research Lab since the ‘90s, and one day I met Ulrika Andersson there, who happened to be curating a display at the Chabot Space and Sciences Museum in Oakland.
I had some experience with plasma, and she asked me if I could make a very large plasma globe for a ‘Touch the Sun’ exhibit.
The result is this 22” globe, made with the help of Ed Kirshner, master plasma artist.
Magnetic fluid display
The other part of the ‘Touch the Sun’ exhibit was to be a magnetic fluid display. Another company got the contract, but their display failed because the magnetic fluid stuck to the vessel and resulted in a smear.
Ulrika asked me if I could do this, so I embarked on a long series of chemical experiments to develop a way of allowing the magnetic fluid to ‘swim’ in a clear liquid, and not stick to the container. After many attempts and with some luck, I developed the technology, and built the exhibit. The magnetic fluid can be manipulated from below with a magnet to form beautiful patterns.
My two ‘Touch the Sun’ exhibits were installed in 2013, and were supposed to last a year. In 2019, they are still going strong. The technology for the magnetic fluids was published as an Instructable.
Titanium Bike
In the late ‘90s someone bashed into my car and I got an insurance check. Rather than fix the car, I went to a titanium bike building course in Ashland, Oregon, and then went home, got a nice TIG welder, and
proceeded (slowly) to build this titanium bike. Titanium welding is VERY touchy, and took a lot of practice. This led to teaching titanium welding for several years at The Crucible in Oakland.