This week, I mainly got to mess around with the wire sculpting. I’ve tried a few different things, and I realized that with the size of the solenoid I would be using it probably isn’t feasible to have the pump system setup inside the sculpture, I will just have it added onto the side but out of view. I tried shaping the wire to look a bit more like the chicken wire and it ended up giving the same effect I had in mind for this project originally, but it is fairly difficult to work with and getting the look I wanted would mean that the whole sculpture wouldn’t be super solid or stable.
Wrapping the wire around things was another method I messed around with, and it proved a lot more stable. I also tried making a more solid frame to add onto, as the form gets more complicated. The first picture below was an attempt at an arm and hand, the second picture is the frame for the head and torso.
I’m thinking of changing the sculpture to be a large hand and have the water dripping out of one of the fingers. It poses some more stability problems, but it might come out much clearer than a person kneeling down. I can make it taller much easier, and the water would be more well spaced away from any business in the sculpture which would work better for the water drop illusion.
I also tried to see just how precise I would need to be with the water drop rate and strobe. I poked a tiny hole in a plastic bag and used a strobe app on my phone to test out how difficult the illusion would be to show. Often with this illusion, people will dye the water very vibrantly to make it more visible, so I have that as an option down the line, but regardless, it turned out fairly well. This video is not reversed or in slow motion. It’s difficult to pick up with a camera, but even with an unreliable drip rate, and with the strobe putting out just around 14 flashes a second, the water drops appear to be falling upwards. I had to adjust the strobe frequency by very small increments to get it just right, changing it by tenths of a Hertz at a time, but with this it shows that the illusion might be possible to create even without a solenoid. I thought I would be going home twice this past week for some medical appointments, and I have a small water pump and some circuit parts there that I could use for the solenoid, but the appointments are this week. I also have the components for the strobe circuit coming in this week, so I can start testing that out soon as well.