Circles Project

Spaghetti and paper circles rotating and casting shadow, film link: xxxxxxxxxx

Light and clocks at the British Museum; Babbage cogs; combustion engine fly wheel, gears, difference engine, Science Museum - time, mechanisation

Ralph Steiner – Mechanical Principles, 1930 www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkQ2pXkYjRM

I visited Gleaves on St John’s street near Farringdon Station and bought some broken clocks and a bag of watch parts.

A random selection of the watch pieces

Deconstructing a clock to try and understand how it was put together.

Clock pieces and watch parts

Cog and spring light experiments Pavement circles

Mechanical counter, Science Museum

Babbage’s plan of the Analytical Engine, 1834 – the first computer, which was only ever partially built, but Plan 28.org a charity are in the process of building it. I wanted to explore the plan, which I found visually compelling with all its circles, and to present it in different ways; especially as computers are such a key part of our lives today. Firstly, working out how many different wheel sizes there were using opacity 20% to 100% in turquoise, 20% to 100% in blue and 20% to 80% in yellow, a total of 25 different circular sizes.

Different colours for different functions: mill or the hub of where the information is calculated – orange, memory storage – pink, temporary storage – ingress green, egress brown, and the highway – purple.

The Analytical Engine using my clock cogs, one for each different size. Knowing how many cogs sizes I needed, I could construct a picture.

Babbage’s Analytical Engine was feed numerical information using punch cards. The Jacquard loom, 1801, was the first to use punched cards to programme looms to weave patterns.

Experiments to explore the punch card I made at home.

They resemble dominoes. The negative circular space provides the meaning.

Characters from cogs and old waste materials, top left: watch cog person; other images: Christian Voltz, 2009-11

From top left, clockwise: Clockwork Universe, Tim Wetherell; Fly, Paul Loughbridge, Lockwasher Design; Goby Fish, Harriet Mead; Crab, Harriet Mead, Spider

Mad God Universe, Keith Newstead; far right Fish, Matt Smith

Help, Kazu Harada

Lost Thing and sketch, Shaun Tan; Dehydration, George Grie; Howl’s Moving Castle, Studio Ghibli

Leonardo da Vinci cog reconstruction model and sketches of water-lifting devices

Water mill and model of a spinning Jenny, invented 1764

Industrial revolution 1760–1840, www.heritagedaily.com

The Fever Van, L. S. Lowry, 1935

The Pond, L. S. Lowry, 1950

Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGNYyG8F 7WY and Ralph Steiner, The City, 1939

RSA 2010-2013, Self-illusion

In 1936 Alan Turing invented computer technology that led to the computers that we recognise today. Inside the Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro, www.news.cnet.com.

The Blue Brain Project ‘reconstructing the brain

piece by piece and building a virtual brain in a super-computer’ to understand

the brain and neurological diseases better

Cog watch monster, from the parts of watches. See also Flying Lotus music video www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuQGfk9Gmgo

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The Waste Land. 1922. Line 60–69

Unreal City,Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hoursWith a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

“Rational calculation...reduces every worker to a cog in the bureaucractic machine and seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask himself how to transform himself...to a bigger cog”

Max Weber 1864–1920

fragmentation, movement, rotation, texturemechanical, rational, alienation, mindless

circle, cog, time, industry, technology

rationality to the point of the irrational more connected and yet less connected