Due: Mon, Jan. 21, 5PM.

Textiles are constantly in motion all around us, from clothing to flags to sails. But the central question of this course is how to create expressive movements in a textile piece using automation, that is, with deliberate intent but without direct human interaction.

For this exercise, we would like to help you develop your understanding of the possibilities and difficulties of this problem by using a capstan winch system to puppet a single piece of cloth to perform an expressive movement.

We would like you to restrict yourself to a single square or rectangle suspended from two, three, or four lines. We will provide a four-motor capstan winch together with software to ease creating an actuated motion.

As a first step, we strongly recommend attaching short lines to your fabric and practicing manual puppetry to explore the possible motions. The central challenge is limiting your hand movements to linear spaces analogous to the capabilities of the motors. The fabric, though, can respond to the linear movements with complex folds and waves. Even simple line movements combined with air will activate the fabric. As starting points, we suggest exploring these prompts:

  1. slow drifting without changes of shape
  2. sailing, rippling, floating through the air
  3. collapsing or folding into a heap
  4. rhythms and patterns

After identifying a movement of interest, practice hand-puppetry to refine a brief performance and capture video documentation.

Then come to the lab outside of class time and explore creating a similar motion via the interactive winch interface. Note that your hands are capable of considerably more subtle motion than the motors; you may need to adapt your concept as needed. The motors, however, will never get tired.

Clarification: please also shoot video of the motor-driven motions.  When in doubt, shoot early, shoot often, document both final results and any illuminating milestones along the way.

Deliverables

To be uploaded as a post to the course blog:

  1. A brief paragraph outlining your explorations: intended effect, surprises, discoveries, successes.
  2. Short video clip (no more than a minute). Please shoot from a stable camera, not handheld; we have tripods and Magic Arms available at Lending, or you may use a laptop resting on a table. Please embed the video so it can be directly viewed; you may either upload an MP4 file to our server or use supported third-party hosting. N.B. hosted .mov files cannot be embedded; please convert to MP4.

We will review your posts prior to class and select one or more to discuss at the start of our next class.

Grading rubric.

When you go to run the hardware, the exercise 1 lab notes will help.