Interactive Art Brainstorm Blog : Project 2 // "MOTION!"

The second we did the servo lab I knew exactly what I wanted to do with this project. Controlling a servo motor with a potentiometer, one to one, you turn the dial, the arm moves. This felt like the most satisfying thing I'd done in this class so far, andt genuinely feels like building a robot. A small, humble robot. But still...

The question became what do I do with an arm that moves. Full robotic arm with joints is out of my range right now. But a single jointed arm can still push something, bat something, move something around a space. That's when pinball came to mind. I don't need a complicated machine, I really just need a track and something to ride it. A person manually pushing a ball around with a dial. Up, around, maybe it falls back down. The cycle repeats.

And that's where it started getting interesting conceptually. Because there's a lot of things in life that are circular like that. Patterns. Processes. Circuits. Then Sisyphus popped into my head, like the Greek mythology guy who pushes a boulder up a mountain forever just for it to roll back down so he can start again. There's something in that image I want to work with. Something about the repetition of it, the futility, but also just the motion itself being the whole point.

I think somewhere in here there's a piece about time, money, the way the world turns. I'm not totally sure what it looks like yet. But I'm excited to find out...