Genie Bottle Update 3

We are still working on building a giant genie bottle, big enough to sit inside and enjoy a few moments to make a wish or two.  We call ourselves Struggletent, the camp that struggles with our tent.

We are community of artist, engineers, designers and makers who are working together to build a 24 foot tall Genie Bottle at this year's Burning Man Art Festival. The Genie Bottle is supported by a grant from Burning Man.   As the lead artist on this project, I am also documenting our progress.  This is my fourth installment on this project.  Read Update 2, Update 1, and The first post.

Will Corvino cut more than 150 pieces on the laser cutter with Paul Brown's specifications.  Here you can see Paul, Jim Crowley, Will, and Melanie Schrader, genies in residence and members of Struggletent, posing with some of the panels that make up the outside of the bottle.

In cutting the panels, we are left with lots of letters, numbers and pretty flourishes, some of which are on the ground here.  You can also see the two doorways on the right.

We are designing the bottle in the spirit of Arabesque art, which includes a tradition of calligraphy.  So, what should we write?  Paul and I chose about a dozen of our favorite math and physics equations to decorate the panels that will be at eye level.  This is the Fourier transform.  (We lost the dot on the i.  Must remember to drill that out.)  We like to think mathematics are the wishes granted by the genie.

This is the washer deck that will be 16 feet off the ground on the finished art.  That stack in the background will be the mezzanine deck, which will be about 5 feet off the ground.

On top of this washer, we built one of the smaller levels as our test level.  Start small. Then go big!

The bottle has 140 side panels cut on a laser cutter into trapezoids.  Then, we have to cut all four edges of every piece to have a bevel so that the pieces will fit together at the proper angles.  Paul figured out all the angles, and we are using a table saw and a jointer saw to cut them.  Here Paul works the table saw, while I admire Marty Kenney's knotwork designs.

Assembling the pieces requires lots of drilling of nails, thousands and thousands of nails! Fortunately, Stuggletent has many helping hands and several power drills.  This day's drillers including Theresa Whitney-Corvino, Paul and Jim.  Will is in the background beveling two-by-twos on the jointer.  We use the two-by-twos to join almost every seam.

You can see some of the two-by-twos on the inside here.  The seams that won't be joined by two-by-twos will have either bigger wood or metal brackets.

The top level will have a crow's nest that Mike Ryan and Scott Anderson are making from rolled steel.

Here is Mike Ryan preparing to bend the steel pipe.  And here I thought that only Super Man could bend steel.  Maybe Mike actually is Super Man?!

Here we are leveling the ground for our test build.  The Playa will be very flat, and we need a very flat surface to build our sculpture.  Will ran the rototiller, then, Will, Theresa, Paul, Jim and I all helped with the raking and leveling of the dirt.  We will have just enough space for the ground level deck plus just enough room to squeak around each edge when it's built.

Here you can see how far we are today, two layers of panels and the washer deck.   Doesn't Marty's artwork in the cutouts look amazing? 

Thanks for looking! Here you can see photos of the finished Genie Bottle at Burning Man.

Mini Ionic Icosahedron in Neon Pink

My neon pink beads spoke to me, and this is what they said. 

This little beaded bead is just 21 mm along its largest diameter, from silver bead to silver bead. 

It's for sale.  Click the photos to go to the listing. 

Although I do not have a tutorial for this exact design, I do have a tutorial that explains how to make a lot of related beaded beads. To find out about how you can learn to make your own Ionic Polyhedra, visit http://www.beadinfinitum.com/Kits/Ionic_Polyhedra.html. Thanks for looking.

Conway Bead Variation with Tiny Drops

I've been fiddling with the sizes of the beads using my my newest tutorial, Conway Bead.   This version of the Conway Bead uses tiny drop beads instead of some of the seed beads, but otherwise, it's the same as what's written in the tutorial, including the O-bead embellishment. This ornate cluster is composed of nearly 400 beads. It is very round and hollow and has a very appealing squish to it. It's quite soft and springy without being droopy. The shape reminds me of a virus.

This beaded bead is 25 mm (1 inch) in diameter, suitable for a focal bead on a necklace. There are a couple of different ways to string this, and the largest hole is big, 4 mm wide, wide enough to accommodate a thick cord or chain.

 It's for sale in the Beaded Beads Section of my Etsy shop.

Thanks for looking!

Genie Bottle Update 2

The Genie Bottle, a Burning Man Honorarium Art Project is progressing. Marty Kenny designed all of the cutouts to be cut into the wood, and Paul Brown inserted them into this Solidworks rendering. If you click on the photo, you can see we also added some of our favorite math equations to be cut out of the wood. In the spirit of Arabesque art, we wanted to add some "calligraphy" and in the spirit of genie magic, what's more magical than beautiful mathematics? The math IS the genie!

Using Paul's computer model, Christy Burback and I made a little scale model out of card stock and tape.  It's about 1/18 of actual size. We cut out and traced the pieces using the specs from Paul Brown's design.  Here you can see Christy with her arm up inside the bottle.

While I am the lead artist on the Genie Bottle, for most of the tasks for designing the Genie Bottle, I've delegated them to other crew members.  I've been leading the designers and engineers towards a particular aesthetic for the overall piece, but like the cutouts for the wood and the lighting, other member of Struggletent are leading the efforts to design and build individual components.  The finished Genie Bottle and its burn will truly be the work of a group of people, my campmates of Struggletent.

The one component I'm designing are the tassels, although I won't build them all myself.  Fortunately, we have lots of helping hands.    My vision is to have a set of 10 large tassels and cording to hang inside the bottle for decoration.  This is my drawing for how I want them to look, more or less.  I haven't decided what color to paint the finials yet.

This is some of the wool we will be using.  This is about a pound of wool.  You can also see the wooden finial that Mike Ryan made for me.  It's got a hole drilled in the center, meaning it's a giant bead. Painted wooden finials like this will top each tassel, effectively turning them each into a big bushy mop with a handle.

Making these tassels requires dying a lot of wool, over 7 pounds of soft springy Merino. (In two dye pots, I can dye 3/4 of a pound at a time; so it's taking me days and days to dye it all!)  This is what the purple wool looks like in the dye pot before the dye has soaked in.

Finial Master Mike Ryan also did a practice burn of the bottle last week at a camp out.  You can watch the video of the burn here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qr6W50dggg
A structure like this will fit inside of the Genie Bottle and will be built inside of it on burn night, tentatively scheduled for Friday at Midnight.  "It is designed to be an anaerobic burn and has minimal oxygen, That's how the smoke is developed. Once a heat source reached a stoichometric point, it ignited."  That's why it shoots fire out the top.

While we're on Burning Man art, I thought I'd share some updates about Bat Country, our previous Burning Man Honorarium Art from 2008, 2009, and 2013.  First, we're published in The Washington Post this week in a slide show titled, "A New Way to Look at Math."  We're #7.

I also got some really nice photos from photographer George Post of Bat Country from 2013.

Here you can see the whole crew at the top as I hold up the very last ball to be attached at the apex.  THIS was a very exciting moment for me and the whole Struggletent crew, and I'm so pleased that George sent me a photo to commemorate it.

And here's a really stunning photo of Bat County and the Temple of Wholiness.

Thanks George Post.  And thank you for looking.
Here you can read Genie Bottle: Update 3.  Here you can see photos of the finished Genie Bottle at Burning Man.

Infinity Dodecahedron Necklace with Lampwork Glass Beads

My favorite way to wear beaded beads is strung simply on cord.  In fact, that's how I usually wear them.

For this necklace, I made 4 beaded beads, including three Infinity Dodecahedron and an Infinity Cube (on the far right). Then, I added 4 borosilicate and lampwork glass beads torched by 4 different artists. Together they make a pallet of aqua, silver and gray. This is an unusual and pretty strand of beads, eclectic yet harmonious.

They're all strung on a 26 inch piece of silk cord, tied simply at both ends. If you enjoy stringing beads, you could use this set as a beginning of a more elaborate necklace, but I would wear them just as they are, strung on cord.

Includes 4 inches (10 cm) of beads. Largest beaded bead measures just under an inch (22 mm).  This necklace is for sale.  Click the photos to go to the listings.  Infinity Dodecahedron Beaded Bead tutorial is available here. Thanks for looking!

Beaded DNA Earrings in Greens

Last night I made a long pair of green DNA Earrings, and today I listed them in the Earrings Section of my Etsy shop. 

With 12 sets of base pairs, these earrings are a bit longer than I typically make. The length of earrings from top of ear wire is 72 mm (almost 2 3/4 inches).

The coloring of the base pairs comes from the enzyme PpiI which is found in the microorganism Pseudomonas putida. Pseudomonas putida is a safe strain of soil bacterium, and is the first patented organism in the world. Because it is a living organism the patent was disputed and brought before the United States Supreme Court in the historic court case Diamond v. Chakrabarty which the inventor, Ananda M. Chakrabarty, won. It demonstrates the ability to biodegrade organic solvents such as oil. The specific base pair sequence shown in each earrings is
GAACN5CTC
CTTGN5GAG

I like the way the spirals look from different angles.

 The helices are stiff, but flexible.  They bend from side to side, but they don't untwist.

If you would like to learn to make your own beaded DNA earrings, try my free video tutorial on how to make DNA earrings with beads.  Thanks for looking!

Bat Country in the Press

Yesterday, was a very good day.  You see, yesterday, my name and my art were published in The Guardian Online Newspaper.  Apparently, the newspaper's online edition is the third most widely read in the world.  Anyway, Alex Bellos writes a column called Alex's Adventures in Numberland, where he wrote about a new book called, 50 Visions of Mathematics, and my art is one of the 50 photos in that book.  This book is published by Oxford University Press, which is the largest university press in the world, and the second-oldest.

The art of mine they published is Bat Country, the Sierpinski tetrahedron jungle gym that I created with Paul Brown and our Struggletent crew with help from Burning Man.  A big photo of Bat Country is in that book.  What's more, we're even on the cover!

Yup, my name and my Playa art are on The Gaurdian website, and on the cover of a OUP math book!

Yesterday was a very good day.