Mark Esper

Materials: polycarbonate plastic, wood, audio sound track, 109 circuits with infrared sensors and electromagnets, 109 pendulums made of nails, Bondo, magnets and fishing line, 109 small speakers with amplifiers enclosed in modified aluminum cat food cans, Seven infrared lamps made of steel, acrylic light filters, light bulbs, fans and circuits.

Size: This is a mushroom shaped installation nine feet high. The overhead part is fourteen feet across. The stem of the mushroom is five feet across.

This is an ambitious project that I can imagine doing on a really large scale.
It is in part an exercise in self-organizing form. I am always trying to draw a poetic arc between science and the arts. It is obvious to me that the emerging cosmology of science is bound to replace the confabulations of myth and religion.
Unlike religion, science is a method of inquiry rather than a collection of assumed truths. The freedom of the scientific method, when applied to ethics, creates an exciting world of possibilities, which can at times be a scary place.

The stem of the mushroom shaped installation contains the 109 circuits and the 109 pendulums. The overhead part holds the 109 speakers, each one corresponding to one of the circuits. The pendulums contain magnets. When a pendulum passes over its corresponding circuit, the circuit momentarily switches on, energizing its electromagnet. This pushes the pendulum away so that each time the pendulum passes over its circuit, a little energy is added to the swing of the pendulum, and by extension, the average level of kinetic energy contained in all the pendulums. Because the polarity of the magnets in all the pendulums is the same, they have subtle effect on each other’s movement. The movement begins by looking random, though it isn’t. Soon, local organized movement arises. After a while all the pendulums move in phase with each other.

The way a pendulum signals a circuit to come on is by reflecting infrared light onto the sensor that crowns its electromagnet. This happens when a pendulum passes directly over the sensor. The source of the infrared light is the seven lamps that sit on the floor below the circuits.

There is an audio component to this project. An audio track is constantly played and made available to the speakers. A speaker plays the audio track when its corresponding pendulum passes over its circuit, turning it on momentarily. While the circuit is on, the speaker plays the on going audio track. The audio track is a reading about James Clerk Maxwell and his discoveries. At the beginning, the audio track is understandable. Soon, it becomes progressively hashed up. When the pendulums are swinging together in phase, the audio is musically rhythmic experience. So, the self-organized movement of the pendulums drives spoken word into an other ways organized aural experience.