Performance Proposal

I, Jay Vette, plan to go to a bridge on campus, and tie a wooden platform under it and lay on it, face down, for the 3 hours above the water. AJ Lanphere will be helping me set this up and will document me. I won't be allowed to talk to anyone or lay on my back. I'm getting materials from Lowe's.

Breathless- 2 Minute Song

Jays movie.m4v

Kinetic Sculpture

I found this project to be one of the most fun yet! We were given an electric motor and told we had to make a kinetic sculpture, kind of like out automata, only motorized. We were allowed partners, ones who had ideas similar to outs. My partner was Jessica Meltzer. We put our ideas together and ultimately decided on some sort of conveyor belt. What the conveyor belt would do required more thought. We eventually decided it would be used to crack an egg. Jess then decided that as a final touch, we should cook the yolk that came out. So our plan was to build a conveyor belt out of wood panels, vacuum belts, and plastic wheels, mount it on the wall, and have the egg fall into a funnel after it moved along the belt. The funnel had nails sticking out of it which cracked the shell and prevented the pieces from getting into the electric Crockpot we had under it. So the thing literally moved an egg, the egg fell, and it cracked, and then it was cooked. No deep meaning. just fun.

Automaton

Automatons are a form of mechanical toy designed to either serve as entertainment or to actually serve a function. Early robots were defined as automatons. For this project, we were to design an automaton using certain principles of mechanics such as gears, pistons, levers, and many others.

My automaton I designed to look like an old car engine. The crankshaft design I utilized was one I made up, using two reciprocating shafts. One shaft has a crank that was turned, which transferred its power to the other shaft with rubber bands, which turned a fan attached to the second shaft. I then decorated it with spray paint and various bits of junk to create an atmosphere sort of like a "mechanical wasteland."

Tracking Time Without a Clock

In this assignment, we had to figure out a way to record a passage of approximately 22 hours without using any type of traditional clock. So, I recored time by using the people I talked to most throughout the day. To do this, I had people I spoke to stamp their fingerprint on a sheet of paper, and then I'd write their name on their print. For each period of "talking time" with them, i would trace their fingerprint with a pen. At the end of the day, I had about 20 fingerprints, with as many as six rings around one. This recorded the time I spent talking to these people throughout the day in a way much like how a tree has rings to show its age.