Concept

Since I was away for the entirety of string break, and had a very full Monday, this update sadly only contain theatrical sketches, calculations, and models in SolidWorks.

Going forward from my first update, I quickly thought of the Tower of Babel, the biblical story that tells a story of mankind, with a uniform language, decided to construct a tower with its roof in the sky, but the LORD observed this and confounds their speech so they can no longer understand and work with each other.

Given the site specific nature of this project, I would like to build a Tower of Babel amongst the bookshelf in Hunt library, to use it as a medium to discuss the relationship between language and human knowledge.

Design

The mean design consist of a tall middle support that has side support sticking out of it, with higher side supports being shorter. A long and thin fabric in turn will be attached to these side support to form a spiral shape going upwards, much like the drawing of the tower above.

The middle support
A closeup of connection between middle and side support

I will also use the embroidery machine to write texts along the spiral line, and as a metaphor for the LORD confounding human language, the text will be written in English, but encrypted with a cipher algorithm very popular in the ancient times. The text below is generated using a Python script I wrote, their embroidery file counterpart is also generated using processing and the PEmbroider library. It will be a fun challenge for anyone interested to decrypt the bellow text, and upon doing so, the text should make perfect sense contexture wise.

Opx vjg zkroh ievxl mfi utk shunbhnl ivl cqn ckwo hzcod Mzp nf hvsm bxvgpits vhec kyv wskl maxr wugy pkji w mixfk gl sgd land pg Ujkpct dqg wixxpih ymjwj Gtj aolf aiql cx yxo lyzespc Oayq yrg ig bpzt rhysai reu xajw maxf nbilioabfs Viy pdau exa zpgai enq stone boe dkvwogp iru qsvxev Ymjs znke zhpk Kwum unc ec mftwo agdeqxhqe n qwhm pcs q kfnvi oalz bml nij di pda ebxsbkp ylb kds us nblf c qdph jsv tzwxjqajx uznkxcoyk dl apitt kn cmkddobon lmczlo gbaz gur toqs du jxu nyfcv wsjlz Max FILX xvhz zksj ql qcc sgd city boe vjg wrzhu almgl rtwyfqx ngj ibpsa Ivl cqn VYBN dlto Xaaw gurl ofs dct fuefbu reu lzwq atox uff jiz hwjcqwca xka rfgq hr only uif dgikppkpi ri alex ymjd corr kv vwbpqvo cqjc droi aczazdp fa qb kwzz cdl ru zdgfjjzscv xgj maxf Wigy gzo qo dl bmul zmc confuse uifjs ncpiwcig wkhuh ws ymfy znke dpss vwb dwmnabcjwm yxo lyzespc ebqqot Fb hvs ADGS isqjjuhut kyvd stjgsv ykhf nbyly jqzm pda cxzb md zkk the fbsui cpf wkhb pijx tkk haorjotm aol kqbg Cqnanoxan sd hld omxxqp Onory psqoigs iwtgt jxu CFIU ugfxmkwv max fuhaouay ja whh qeb cyprf zmc from uifsf vjg ORUG wgexxivih ymjr ghxugj vcly bpm ojln yp lww ftq rnegu

LORD, maybe

Calculations

After measuring the dimensions of my chosen site, I decided to have my spiral tower to have a bottom (outer) diameter of 80cm, and upper (inner) diameter of 40cm. The fabric will have a height of 20cm, inclining at a 20degrees angle upwards to the top.

This means for each revolution of the fabric spiral, we will have a elevation of

I decided to do 7 revolution, so the total structure height would be at lest 1.5meters. This also means I need at least

6.6meters of fabric, or 1.32square meters of fabric.