open studio

open studio: selfie on the raft of medusa /  by kelly heaton

Selfie on the Raft of Medusa, 2015. Digital photo collage. Kelly Heaton

I made this photo-collage, "Selfie on the Raft of Medusa," 2015, after Theodore Gericault's epic painting, "The Raft of the Medusa," 1818-1819. Gericault portrays the hastily constructed life raft of the Medusa, a French naval frigate that wrecked in 1816 killing most of her crew and creating an uproar over the perceived incompetence of the French monarchy. It's one of the greatest paintings in history. 

Joseph Campbell attributes the myth of Medusa to "an actual historic rupture, a sort of sociological trauma, which has been registered in this myth, much as what Freud terms the latent content of a neurosis is registered in the manifest content of a dream: registered yet hidden, registered in the unconscious yet unknown or misconstrued by the conscious mind."

Medusa: rage of the feminine principle. She speaks to me right now. She speaks of frustration with human self-absorption, abuse of Mother Earth, dependence on fossil fuels and electricity, and hubris.

Jack London quotes Benjamin de Casseres in 1914: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that sets him free."

open studio: making a big bee resistor /  by kelly heaton

The process of making a larger-than-life resistor, modeled by hand to look like a bee


Big bee resistor after epoxy buddy is applied and sculpted.  Next, the sculpture will be painted

 

open studio: welding brass skep /  by kelly heaton

Top row, left to right: making of the traditional bee skep (from Wikipedia); a stack of welded brass rings; brass rings with a ground surface to create straw-like texture; shaping the segments of the brass rings with a peening hammer and wooden cradle

Bottom row, left to right: welding the brass rings together with an oxyacetylene torch and brazing rods; two welded rings with clamps to attach a third; measuring the uppermost ring, which has been hammered to reduce its diameter, in order to create a tapered top for the skep; a bee skep from a french fairytale

electricity: breathing motor /  by kelly heaton

An astable multivibrator controls a Darlington amplifier to drive a small pager motor. The gently rising and falling motor speed simulates breathing or other natural undulations.  The addition of other control stages could add complexity, if that's what you want.

Circuit design by Kelly Heaton, 2014.  If you try to build this and it does not work, I'm sorry… I am more artist than engineer.  I sometimes struggle to reproduce my own circuit diagrams, but I have learned that tinkering with frustrating electronics is a great way to make new art.

This analog circuit is comprised of two parts: an astable multivibrator that creates a low-frequency square wave (left side) to switch on/off a Darlington amplifier (right side) that drives the pager motor.  I have added various capacitors and a resistor to the amplifier stage.  These affect the quality of the motor speed, making it turn on and off more naturally.  The video shows me removing / replacing the pull-up resistor on the emitter of the second NPN transistor, illustrating its function (to provide a baseline motor speed so that the motor does not come to a complete stop, but instead undulates between a faster and a slower speed).

open studio: 05_07_14 /  by kelly heaton

Top row: bees made from wire, resistors and beads; tiny leads for 100+ incandescent lamps; Bottom row: brass honeycomb; homemade capacitors (on styrofoam previously marked-up for resistors)