APD Week 5 - Play and Forces

By Yunshu Shu (Maggie)

Theme

For this week's theme, I built a device with a swinging pen and created drawings using the force of gravity.

Context

This week's theme, Play and Forces, reminds me of the video 'You Are Not Where You Think You Are' by Kurzgesagt explaining the nature of the universe and relative positions. It mentioned that the Earth orbits around the Sun in an ellipse, and every 112,000 years the ellipse drifts away a little bit, creating an orbital path that looks like a wobbly circle with wavy edges (You Are Not Where You Think You Are, 2022). I was also inspired by Jackson Pollock and his widely known 'drip technique' of splashing paints onto the canvas to create beautiful abstract arts. I want to combine the two ideas and explore with swings and the force of gravity.

Method

Attach a red pen to a lamp with a piece of twine rope
Place a piece of paper at the bottom and adjust the height of the pen so it touches the paper
Swing the pen in random directions to let it draw freely
Experiment with different types of pens to create different drawings, observe the pigmentation and smoothness

In the end, I have generated four drawings using a red pen, a black sharpie, a HB pencil and a yellow highlighter. Each one of them has a different colour, stroke, texture and hardness. Out of the four pens, the yellow highlighter had the best result and I placed it in front of a set of LED lights to bring out the contrast. After testing with a few different lightings, I found it to be best viewed in front of blue lights.

Reflection

I really enjoyed this week's design because to some extent, it allowed me to draw without rules and let gravity do the work. I didn't have to worry about making mistakes because every motion and line is part of the process. However, the downside of using pens is that they weren't heavy enough to swing for a long time. If I had more time to prepare the tools, I would consider using something heavier like a metal disk to balance the weight.

References

2022. You Are Not Where You Think You Are. [video] Available at: <https://youtu.be/Pj-h6MEgE7I> [Accessed 24 May 2022].

Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/K9fcxIseYJc