Week 3 - Halfway There???
Somehow we’re halfway through the first half of the semester (so a quarter way through the Fall). I had a hard time finding poems. Originally, I had an idea to construct an automata to type on a phone, but many of my projects involve phones so I wanted to make something more fun and different then what I’ve made before.
I decided to try and find poems related to one of my interests outside of ITP: Hiking. So I went through the Poetry Foundation’s poems on Transcendentalism and Romanticism before eventually finding two poems I liked.
The first poem is To Autumn by John Keats. It describes the transition from Summer to Fall from the leaves changing, branches bending from apples, fruits coming to bear even as the days become shorter. Not only did it feel apt for right now, but it the slowness of the poem also reminded me to take a step back in my own day-to-day to notice the same things the poem described. The characters of the poem were: Trees, squash, corn, and the sun.
Meanwhile, the second poem is Mont Blanco: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni by Percy Shelley. The poem went through the beauty and danger of Mont Blanc and the Alps as an unforgiving desert as a place to person would live. Over four pages the poem described in different ways the dangers of the mountain as a force of nature from strong weather to avalanches, but also with woven throughout was beautiful descriptions of the landscape and the alps.
My first automata idea involves a tree revealing an apple that falls to the ground. Similar to the Marvelous Orange Tree, two leaves could open to reveal an apple. The apple would be connected to fishing wire and a lever behind the apple would kick it out of the tree falling several inches. Turning a crank, the fishing wire can be rewound using the tree to hide the mechanism resetting the apple to it’s place.
Meanwhile the second automata would showcase Mont Blanc rising from the ground. Using countour lines broken into individual organic shapes the new shapes can be attached to different cams that gradually rise when a central shaft is rotated.
I did experiment modeling contour lines in Fusion360 by taking an SVG and extruding to the same height and offseting where they’re placed on the y-axis:
