ITP – Page 2 – phil caridi

November 13, 2021

RE:Search, Research

My thesis looks at life through a lens of the fleetingness of time and the relationship it has with death and the permanence associated with it, and how memory bridges the gap between life and death. Chaos and discovery are two constants I associate with life and ultimately the pursuit of death. It my seem odd to talk about life as the pursuit of death, but in the end that’s what we have been chasing the whole time. The unknown release of what death brings, questions about what comes after, questions about how we will be remembered – if we will be remembered. There have many other works before this and there will be many other works after this that deal with the topic of death but I envision this as a unique interactive installation that abstracts time, life, death and memory into two discrete experiences that together make the viewer think of the path of their life in a new light.

Find my Research Journal here: https://www.notion.so/Research-Journal-d5981c2cb2cb4f949a85587f19425ed8

Nothing to Something

The theme behind my thesis has been pretty well defined for some time now, “The permanence of Death and the Fleetingness of Time”, how do we relate to both life and death? what part does memory and experience play in how we move through time. Why is death a taboo subject especially when it is quite literally the only truth to life? Why is there such a large percentage of the population that fears death? The way we connect events from or life with meaning can be convoluted at best, I want to show how experience does not necessarily translate to memory. What part, if any does memory play in death? Is death the beginning of a loop() or id it the end()?

November 11, 2021

DriP

DriP is a sculptural representation of how time wears away at even the hardest things.

DriP is constructed with concrete, mahogany, brass, and marble. Hidden beneath the marble is a reservoir filled with water and a submersible pump. Very slowly at the rate of one milliliter per minute water is pumped through the brass tube and dropped on to the center of the marble pate. The slow erosion of the marble by the water is a metaphor for the way time wears at everything, eventually reducing even the hardest of materials to nothing.

November 4, 2021

Phil-The beginning of the beginning

A few thought to start the process…

Death, how do we as a culture view and deal with death? How does my thought of death differ from those around me, from those that come form different cultures. The topic of death comes up in my work often. Time is also a theme that I think about constantly. How do we experience time? Why does it pass differently for different people? Why does it pass differently depending on the situation? In my thesis I want to explore both time and death, and how we relate to these concepts. Specifically the fleetingness of time and the permanence of death.
The idea of Pendulight started in Energy (class) as a way to create an artifact from the kinetic energy of a moving pendulum. The original project had a compound leaver arm attached to the drive shaft of a stepper motor. the viewer/user had control of the speed and direction of the stepper through discrete controls. The change in direction and speed would cause chaos in the movement of the pendulum. Its this chaos in the movement that made me start thinking about this as an illusion to life, how life changes direction without notice, how the energy of life is in a constant ebb and flow, how one day the movement of life will stop.
There are a number of technical aspects of this piece that need to figured out to expand the original concept. I can see how many of those details can be solved but the biggest are of concern is in regard to the interactions of the viewer/user. Some feedback I’ve been given is to change the interactions from discrete to intangible. This makes sense to me, however, I want to make the interactions so they can be discovered and have meaning to the overall piece and subject of the installation. the suggestion was made to use sensors to control the variables that influence the behavior of the pendulum.

A letter to myself

Phil,

When you started this journey you were 40 years old, how does death resonate with you now that another 40 year have passed? Is death still a cold silent darkness or have you lived enough that the cyclical nature of life is more please to your psyche? I learned innumerable things along the way to the point in my life and I wonder what other pieces have fallen into place since writing this. Did the world crumble around us? Did we find a way to save this earth or did the damage take over? Are you even reading this right now or was this sent into the void never to be unearthed by my future self?

The hope for this project was to make people understand how time moves on without regard for anything around it. To make us think about the present and how the future for all of us is the same, death comes for us all, and weather you believe in reincarnation, heaven or hell, or an afterlife of some sort we must realize that it will not be the same as it now. The memories of this lifetime will not influence nor come to light in the infinite time of death. I’ve said it before, this thought of death, how we relate to it, and how it will inevitably come to fruition is not morbid; its real. Even for Methuselah’s children death descended upon them, we as a society must strive to normalize death in a way that makes us unafraid of what is to come. I think that’s why I look at death so much, I am not at peace with death. This piece is therapy in a way, forcing me to understand fear of the unknown, forcing me to sit with uncomfortable thoughts. There are very few constants in life, in fact I can really on think of one and that is death. For whatever lives must die, must return to stardust, must continue the cycle of entropy to afford the ever-present expansion and eventual contraction to the cosmos.

Phil, I hope meaning found its way to you. I hope that you feel as though you have accomplished what you were put here to do, I don’t yet know what that is and I probably won’t for years to come.

With all the love possible,

phil at year 40

Research will be compiled in the following are.na channel.

https://www.are.na/phil-caridi/thesis-research-ne1iwvgdfoy

If you want to see my work over the past year or so head to:

https://www.philcaridi.com

October 31, 2021

Sketch3

The above video is a simulation of the sun’s movement on November 2nd, 2021 at exactly 370 Jay ST in NYC, 40.69296038790204, -73.98745325545592. The virtual sundial shows exactly what you would see through a time lapse of a sundial placed on the roof of 370 Jay ST. The center of the dial is pointed at true north in order to cast the correct shadow on the dial thusly indicating the time by the markings found on the face.

October 31, 2021

DeathDial Final

Original concept post can be found here: DeathDial – Concept

One could hope for 90 years of life. In life it is easy to forget the small details to focus on the big picture, the flip side of that coin is also true. Details get in the way of seeing the whole. DeathDail is a reminder of both of these ideas. The dial focuses on the constant movement of life towards an end, an end that must be present in all things. The movements of each gear no matter how small represent the details in life, while the centrally mounted bar shows the path a whole life traverses. Taking a full 90 years to move from the start position at zero degrees to the end position at 180 degrees.

In the end the gear ration is approximately 1:950,000,000 from the drive gear to the output shaft.

DeathDail – final form with gear studs and centrally mounted dial.

Notes on the original concept, this is was before I made the decision to expose and focus on the gears. Each individual gear contributes to the overall movement of the dial as a whole.

Ideation on how the gears would be held in place, the “gear ramp”. This changes very late in the fabrication process, more on that later.

calculations for gear studs, the eventual solution to the gear ramp problem.

Final gear train, this give the final ratio of approximately 1:950,000,000. this makes the dial move only 180 degrees over the span of 90 years.

Gear train exploration.

Process of working through the arrangement of the gear train.

Completed gear ramp part which was not used in the final production piece do to an issue with the calibration the printer used to produce the part.

I also had issues with printing the mold for the concrete base, the printers I had access to were in disrepair forcing me to figure out a different process. I used a cake pan and a laser cut template to drill holes in the mold.

Bolts were placed through the holes in order to locate the barrel nuts which would act as the anchoring point for the gear studs.

This shows the inside of the cake pan with the barrel nuts fixed in place, the concrete was poured into this to create the base.

Concrete freshly poured into mold.

Cured concrete with bolts acting as plugs just incase the concrete flowed over the barrel nuts.

One half of the gear ramp, the tolerance on the Z-axis of this printer was off by 10% causing the space for the nut inserts to be too small. The wholes for the gear axels were also undersized to the point that the axel would not fit though.

The hole for the axel nut was in-line with the print layers, the pressure of inserting the nut caused the print to fail along the layer lines.

Final assembly of the gear train.

All gears and and central dial mounted.

Each gear stud had to be cut to length and then fine tuned to make sure the gear meshed properly between the previous and next gear.

October 14, 2021

Save Us, Cactus

The final deliverable for Experiential Comics was to create a representation of what our idea of an interactive comic would look like. I wanted to keep the the page layout and the concept of the panel the same, I also wanted to use speech bubbles. For me, these three elements represent what is at the very core of a comic.

Utilizing the touch gestures of tap and swipe the viewer would be able navigate around each panel after selecting it. In moving into the panel, the view will be able to see other events or conversations happening outside the frame of the panel. These other events that happen outside the frame of the panel are extra to the storyline, allowing a deeper dive if the viewer desires. If the the choice is made not to view the extra content, nothing will be lost form the main story.

The magenta highlights and arrows represent the gestures made in each panel to select or move. There are three types of pages contained in the hierarchy of the comic. The navigation page which contains multiple panels; the main story arc page which has speech bubbles; and the explore pages which allow the viewer to move throughout each panel. Floating doorways inside of each panel allow the viewer to exit back to the navigation page.

I used a combination of Unity and Rhino to create the environment. Most assets were purchased from either KitBash3D or from the unity store. Frames were rendered individually and then annotated in Illustrator.

September 26, 2021

Sketch2

This sketch is made of 300 frames taken of the night sky in Wanakena NY. After the sequence of photos were taken I stacked the photos to create the image above. This shows the movement of stars over the course of 6 hours.

September 26, 2021

Sketch1

For this sketch I removed the movement from a 1945 Waltham mechanical manual wind watch. I filmed at 240 frames per second in order slow down the motion of the individual components in order to see how they interfaced. The first half of the video shows the second hand moving as well as some small movements of the internal components. In the second half of the video you can see the escapement oscillating between its two positions as well as the flywheel rotating back and forth between its start and end positions.

September 21, 2021

DeathDial Concept

The DeathDial assumes a 90 year timeline for one’s life. The arm starts in the horizontal position and rotates around a center point at the rate of .5 degrees per hour until it reaches the other horizontal position. At this rate it take 90 hours for the center arm to traverse the 180 degree arc.

Animation showing the movement of the spire over time. The rate at which the spire rotates can be adjusted depending on how I decide to create the movement. I’m looking into creating the motion in one of two ways. The first would be to use a microcontroller, the advantage to this would be the ability top change the time for a full cycle with code. The other way would be to create a set of reduction gears, while this would look very interesting the ability to adjust the output would be increasingly more difficult.

September 16, 2021

Artifact

After some more development with the class on the MURAL board, we were tasked with coming up with the description and attributes of an artifact on the board.