We made a full scale version of our piece and experimented with a mechansim to get the enclosing movement we wanted. Our first iteration looked like:

The following video is a bottom view of this configuration:

Per Garth’s suggestion to reduce the vertical motion of the net, we experimented with converting one of the corners to a pulley system so that the path traced by the corners was an ellipse instead of a circle:

This posed a lot of issues though because the binder clips were not secure enough to support the pulley system. We also were still unsure how to combine the 4 pulleys into a singular control mechanism. Because we ran into a lot of issues implementing the ellipse-pulley system on our full scale piece, we went back to a small scale to visualize the effect:

Eventually, we decided that the effect we achieved with the circular motion was adequate and that we will pursue our original design for our final installation. We thought that the pulley-ellipse system would require much more complicated design considerations for a marginally better effect.

Next we will begin thinking about how to install the lighting, and how to arrange the lights in a meaningful/aesthetic way.

We also have to keep thinking about a place to install. The mindfulness room rejected us because they already have an installation going on from April 10th to May 5th.