Mark Esper

Materials: steel, acrylic, gold leaf, electrical circuits, mechanical components and toy trains.

Installation size: The two glasses form is 4ft. tall, 4ft. long, and 2ft. wide
Total size of the installation is variable up to 20ft. across the corner of a room.

The title of this work – comes from old clockwork machines that were models  of the cosmos, as it was understood in past centuries. One early example of this type of clockwork form was a machine made for Charles Boyle, the fourth Earl of Orrery in 1713. Mechanical renderings of not only the heavenly bodies, but of philosophical views of the universe were often subsequently referred to as Orrery.

My Orrery is a similar attempt to construct a type of clockwork apparatus. However, the basis of my clockwork is electronic, and the orbits rendered are metaphors for people in a common relationship, whose life forces stay tangent with each other or are affected by one another in some way.

The basic concept and operation of the piece is that two glasses turn clockwise, while two trains run on tracks along their rims in an attempt to stay tangent with each other by running in the opposite direction as the glasses move. The glasses are rendered as extremely porous vessels that can only contain thought and feeling, while ever depleting precious dissolving time is suggested by the movement of the glasses golden helix spiral ever downward, ever emptying.

Along the train tracks on the rims of the glasses are sensors that monitor the positions of the trains. At the bases of the glasses are sensors that monitor the positions of the glasses as they spin. There are circuits that compare the positions of the trains running on the glasses rims to the positions of the turning glasses. The circuits control the speed of the trains so that as they travel along the rims of the glasses, in the direction opposite to the direction of the turning glasses, the trains more or less stay in the place where the glasses are closest to each other.