I love how the process was recorded then by just one cat everything came tumbling down. But, somehow this was more interesting to view than the building.

Balancing dominos, if one falls then so do the rest. facinating to watch as so much skill went into putting it together.

Our body is always changing its muscles to balance staning upright and to balance on other surfaces. These guys with difined muscles allow us to witness this.

Balance in breakdance almost distorts the body it becomes so complex, all the time keeping the bodys centre of balance in mind. Agian we can see the effort tyhe body puts into balancing.

Videos of Balancing blocks

I love the way alot of these videos the towers have to be re-built as the balance was put off.

Looking at durable materials to use for outside blocks...

 Thought at the beginning of the day: 

to use a material that would disintergrate somehow as the outside weather would change the balance of that form and make it collapse, but just incase im going to look at durable materials aswell.

Plastrer

 

Kate Gilmore's 'She Bangs - if knocked plaster blocks chip so they would gradually be chipped and disintergrate. However, plaster is incredibly heavy so if the blocks fell they would almost definetly smash or  at least be dangerous to the public ... therfore not interactive.

Casting Resins 

 

Clear Poly Resin Art Craft

Clear and light weight makes clean cut edges. This would be a good material to use = easy to pick up, wont fall apart so will be good outside. However the fact that the material doesnt change over time may be less exciting... but then again because the blocks would be around longer would mean you had more time to mess about with them so then therefore more balance inquiry would be made.

German painter Markus Linnenbrink drills holes into layers of colored epoxy resin, creating pockmark-like craters in dimensional paintings that are busy and alive with color. They have the feel of optical illusions…makes my head spin.

Engadget brings us this exploded iPod (that poor site is getting beat up today), which has been dissembled and placed in a protective block of carbonite translucent resin

Waxes

 Paraffin Wax has a cloudy transparent colouring, is manmade and derived from oil. It is cheap (often used in candle making and has a lower melting point of around 55ºC (131ºF). In the encaustic art blocks is used to decrease the viscosity (make it run more easily when molten).

 Carnauba Wax melt point about 80C - A natural plant wax of golden colour included to raise the melt point, add a little hardness. It also improves the polishing shine of the wax.

 

 
  Beeswax is a natural product containing many ingredients derived from the locality of its origin. Pollens and oils affect the odour, colour and nature of the wax, but generally speaking beeswax melts at about 62ºC (144ºF). It is the basis of all the Ancient's encaustic paints and some definitions require its inclusion for a mixture to be a true encaustic medium.

 Micro Crystalline waxes - Encaustic Art blocks use one that melts at 68 C - a by product wax of oil origin, this wax type offers adjustment to the melting point and the viscosity of the wax as well as the heat curve that affect the way the wax congeals back into a solid.

Anish Kappor uses wax to do an incredible moving wax sculpture. it moves easily through a door way and is moulded to the shape of the door.

"At three metres tall and two and a half wide, the block is too big to fit through the doors, so it will deposit wax on the frames as it squeezes through."

He uses a very malliable soft wax so it moulds through the door easily... this is a possible material as when the wax is balanced on eachother it would then if sunny melt outside and fall over ... the balance being altered and thefore fallin over, creating a new form.

Metals

Bronze

Pewter 

Alloy metal use to contain lead but due to harmful nature of leasd putter only contains Tin, Antimony, and copper. It is silver in colour and can be polished well to make it look like silver.
Pewterhowever is a heavy material and so may not be good for my project (also expensive).

Aluminium

Most abundant metal in the Earths crust therefore it is cheap. It has a low density and therefore is light. Also resists corrosion.
Aluminium is a soft, durable, lightweight, ductile and malleable metal with appearance ranging from silvery to dull gray, depending on the surface roughness.
Although it is light weight i am not sure if it is light enough to allow people, of all ages, to pick up the blocks even if they were hollow.

Iron

Rusts, would take a long time to decompose but it could be monitored over years and become part of the project. Exciting decay. Magdalena Abakanowicz has reliey on the rusting of iron to be "like a tree bark  or wrinkled face  expressing a different individuality of each sculpture"
http://www.abakanowicz.art.pl/

Stainless Steel

Gidon Graetz - Phoenix (2003) in Berlin. 

Stainless steel, notice out side and in water still totaly untouched by corrosion and decay.

Light weight and durable in outside weather. could be good to use but would have no part in decomposing and may be heavy for people to pick up.

Looking at non durable recycled materials to use for blocks

Instead of being solid blocks i could use just the frames of the shapes to make sturdy structures that are relativly durable and hold their structure, but, that are also light weight and easy to stack etc.

Architect Shigeru Ban is well known for a number of high-profile architectural designs but perhaps less so for his artistic and ecological side projects such as the cardboard bridge pictured above. This bridge is composed over over 250 recycled cardboard tubes with recycled paper and plastic comprising the stairs. Amazingly, this recycled bridge can hold up to 20 people at once!


http://ecoble.com/2008/03/12/10-unusually-creative-ways-to-recycle-ordinary-objects/

However, i had it in my mind that these blocks would be solid, this is another possible recycled material:

The BituBlock may interesting and almost artistic … until you realize it is made from post-consumer recycled products including ash, glass and, yes, sewage. Still, it doesn’t smell and ultimately it is an incredibly strong and durable building block that rivals other materials such as concrete that would be used in similar situations – and does so using almost entirely reused and recycled materials.


BUT..... why not have the materials so they decay/dissolve/are no longer present? The work could be a temporary thing .... the materials are just no longer useable after a while because they are going back to the balance of life...  the last position they were in would slowly  degrade into /onto its elf and change sculpturaly but still be the same object.


http://www.michael-hansmeyer.com/projects/columns.html?screenSize=1&color=1#1


But then why be set on having to balance things ... progress from balancing ...

Michael Hansmyer

I could propose to do something like this but with me own design and in different shaped blocks then i am staying with the same idea of building/balancing blocks but also making them more interesting than what has already been done; the big children's blocks for the public..... more mature art work which is what i have been wanting to aim for... more refined and sofisticated. 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7617802.stm

Making people aware of their impact on the planet... also amazing art work and personal as people can come and add to it ... can also write messages in the newspaper ... sentimental, more alive and real.

Using paper or cardboard would allow the material/ form to disintegrate after it had been left outside long enough.

Corks would be light weight but would hold its form ... however this may be a good thing and go with my original idea.

So much cardboard and paper is wasted so would be an excellent material to use in recycling terms ... and it is free. However, it would be very heavy for people to lift and therefore less interactive.

I love the way these shapes fit together. But, it seems they all fit together in a certain way so the way they are dictates they way they should be ... which i don't like.

Paper pulp can be made into blocks that would deform.

Recycled Blocks Materials

Have to find a balance between the right weight, friction, recycledness, size, and availability of blocks.

Some cool things not really do do with project

 I like this as it is an ironic quirky take on a skip .... having just raided a skip its  nice to see this as it doesnt need recycled. it is beautiful and using nature in my opinion it doesnt need changed at all.

 I like this as everone is working together to make a different thing ... could be like the lego totum pole.

Much like the jumping jacks free ebntry cards i made in the studio.

Blocks

Rachel Whiteread kind of uses building blocks in her work ... although they are all ready set out so not as interactive it is still an example of using blocks to build and balance things. Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall,

It is more interactuive as people go around witnessing the massive scale and maze like layout of the work.

"Whiteread's choice of subject-matter reflects an awareness of the intrinsically human-scaled design of the objects with which we surround ourselves and exploits the severing of this connection, by removal of the object's function, to express absence and loss. Her early work allowed autobiographical elements. Later works move towards the expression of a universal human position, and their titles become correspondingly more prosaic."
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=2319&tabview=bio

Lego

Taking lego towers to the extreame - another pitch idea could be to buy a sugar load of lego and let people make their own bit then put it together at the end... much like a totom pole:

The contribution could be something important to the person but it doesnt have to be ... but if it was then maybe the art work would have more meaning to it .... but the prime reason to do this in the first place would be to see how tall it could go with out falling over.... balance related.

Balancing Multiples

I came in on Tuesday to find a skip outside the mac shop so raided the jumping jacks merchandise and advertising flyers inside it. The merchandise in multiples highlighted how much of a consumer society we live in which evoked passionate anger within me. Because  i have always had such a strong drive to recycle things, due to the care my parents have for the environment, i felt i should incorporate this passion into what i am doing in the studio this term ( although at first i wanted to drop the balance theme all together, but, i think maybe the 2 would compliment each other so i am going to do both).

When looking for these pictures above i also came across baby's balancing toys

This got me thinking of a pitch - make a large scale set of objects that fit together much like this that is both easy to interact with and beautiful as individual objects and as a grouped stacking type project. It would be aimed at children but it would be good to encourage adults to use it as well. it would be situated in a public space that would be open and available to the public to interact with. A problem could be that people steal the components of the sculpture.

(Another brain wave is that i have been doodling in my sketchbook of things that fit together very well and it would be easy to repeat the components of them. It would be cool to see what would come of a large scale 3d replica of one of them .... interesting to see people interact with it.)
http://dornob.com/killer-wine-glass-set-7-unique-glasses-for-7-deadly-sins/

Like this but bigger ... however they have to be kept light weight so its easy to move them but not so light that there isn't friction between blocks so therefore they just slide off, like the cardboard boxes.... (the plastic cover is good as it does give friction ... buuuuutttt ... its not recycled and i would like to keep to that theme).