Project Type: Art installation
Roles: Designer & maker & coder
Team: Amanda Willams, Andrea Rovetta, Suedeshna Sen
Timeline: fall 2015
When we building a tensegrity sculpture, it is always tricky for one to find out the accurate length of tensile cable and compression struts without enough knowledge of tensegrity structural calculation. During the time when I interning for Amanda Williams studio, I was thinking about the possiblities of customize a grasshopper script to solve this problem. Within the help from underwood pavilion team and tensegrity plugin maker Masaaki Miki, I've developed and contructed a simple tensegrity sculpture through the grasshopper calculation.
Start from analyze the basic elements of a 4 struts tensegrity module in grasshopper, tested several plugins such as Goat, Galapagus to allow the scripts do the calculation automatically.
Kangaroo is the plugin that played the most critical role in this step.
We then made the installation for the University of Chicago's art studio for their openning show. Through the control of grasshopper simulation, we made the installation in exactly the form we want
We made each module with 4 aluminum pipes and 12 metal cables, and three piece of fabric. Each cable is adjustable with a galvanized turnbuckle.
Each 4 struts module is connected with cables. The first and last module is attached to the wall the floor.
View between layer of fabrics.
