We, Chaja Hertog and Nir Nadler, were invited for a Solo exhibition at Moira (Utrecht). This show focused on sensory experiences and the tongue in particular, featuring moving sculptures, photography and video. For the exhibition we created 2 living objects that function like urban-hybrids; a combination between ready-made objects with animatronics and special effects prosthetics.
1) Lick-it-Ticket - Located at the entrance of the gallery, a red volgnummerautomaat machine welcomes the visitors. This device is similar to the one that is normally placed in entrances of public service buildings such as post-offices or pharmacies, but instead of a paper queue-number a hyper-realistic tongue is sticking out and mocking you.
At the other corner of the gallery space, another red object was installed, a fire hose that slowly swings its tail in boredom.
In this process of developing and constructing these two pieces, Chaja was the one who mainly worked at the Waag FabLab on the animatronics objects while Nir was preparing the rest for the upcoming exhibition (such as the video loop and the 48 white Chocolate Ku-Klux-Klan lolly pops - more about that will be soon found on our website www.hertognadler.com).
Chaja has a background in special effects make-up and props since various years. This project, however, was the First time for her to be working with animatronics and arduino.
It’s been made of little plastic pieces (servo parts) with hard plastic tubes in between them– when the strings are being pulled, it bends in all directions.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t too happy about the ready-made parts and also not with the hard “spine” and so I’ve searched fgor some more and found out about the laser cutter at the fablab and the amazing facilities it has.
From this point on I worked a lot at the fablab and received a lot of useful advice.
Thus I decided to make my own parts instead of purchasing ready-made parts and designed them in Illustrator (also for the first time...). My own specific plexi-glass pieces were cut by the laser cutter and connected together by a rubber tube that function as a spine. Fishing wires runs trough the holes in the plexi-glass pieces and generate the “tongue’s” natural movements when being pulled (first by hand later on by servo motors). In order to keep the space in between the pieces I used “krimpkous/tubing”. In addition to that I bought a complete beginners arduino kit (ARDX Kit) which include the book – “Getting Started with Arduino”.
Step by step I learned how to make the Arduino work and eventually I managed to make 2 servo’s motors run with basic movements, which was a good start I figured.
Step by step - sculpting and mould making of the tongue:
a 5 piece mould was made in which silicone is poured (“Dragon skin” from “FormX”).
The technique of mould making requires a certain amount of practise precision and planning. In case you’re interested to learn more about mould making there is plenty of info on the internet and on the formX website.
Putting it all together:
Testing the system and improving the movement with the help of Konstantin Leonenko, an Arduino expert and programmer (alongside with many other expertise). Together we recorded a long sequence of tongue movements with the use of a keyboard which controlled the servo motor movement. This composition was than played via “supercollider” on a macmini.
Along the process we had couple of problems with the Lick-it-Ticket device and this had to do with different reasons, but mainly because it is such a small sculpture with hardly enough space to hide all the mechanics. Everything had to be small and at the same time as strong as possible to control the movement of the tongue. In the process 3 servo motor’s died.
We are very pleased with the end result of our first steps in animatronics sculptures, it turned out to be a great prototype!
The result of this work process appears to be a very simple object but making an ordinary looking device was a challenging process indeed.
How to make such a long tube move without having wires or other technical elements visible on the outside?
A real fire hose tube is very firm and almost impossible to bend and for that reason we had to create a mould of one and turn it into a much more flexible material such as latex or silicone.
So to start with it we had to make a hollow and long mould of a piece of the fire-hose:
First try: We tried to pour dragon skin (bought at formX) but it wouldn’t seep all the way down to the bottom of the mould.
Second try: Liquid latex seeped nicely until the bottom of our mould but wouldn’t set, not even after 2 days.
Third try: Problem: not all silicones will set if they have had contact with latex. (See cure inhibition --> LINK)
Later on we returned to formX store where we bought new materials: Ecoflex® 00-30 – it’s also a platinum*, low viscosity ssilicone (* which means that it doesn’t have the cure inhibition problems and is also more liquid while pouring). The pouring didn’t go smoothly nor quick but luckily we succeeded in making a very neat and flexible fire hose duplicate
The mechanics/animatronics --> Video - LINK
Similar to the skeleton of the “lick-it-ticket”, the structure for the Brandslang/fire hose movement is done by little plexi glass pieces (orange), which was made with the laser cutter in Fablab. This time I also used little pieces of PVC tube (yellow pieces) in combination with little rubber pieces (black), prepared with the laser cutter.
Test with the servomotor connected to a small pre-programmed Arduino chip -->Video - LINK
The snake-like movement of the inner mechanics worked rather well. Nonetheless, the moment we added the silicone tube on top of it + the iron nozzle it became quiet heavy, thus limited in movement. To lighten things up we then made a quick silicone mould of the nozzle and casted it with liquid plastic (The Smooth Cast® 300 Series).
The servomotor (which is a much bigger one than used at the ‘Lick-it-Ticket) is stronger and the programming of its movement is simple and short. We hid all the mechanics in the fire-hose wheel and it was running days after days without short circuits or any other problems.
We were very pleased with the result but if more time was given we would improve the movement and make it much more organic.
ENDRESULT:
Video - LINK
