Distributed Risk

I built a sculptural video work that transforms the facade of One Court Square into an ever-growing, unending building. Posting here about the literal and metaphorical nut and bolts. Come see it 6/6 & 6/7/2015 - 1717 Trouman St. #214, Ridgewood, NY 11385

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This is the image of the monitor prototype that Cody mocked up. The exterior dimensions are larger than the finals woold be, but the inside edge and the interior dimensions of the frame both match the design. The wooden blocks from the diagram in my last post are holding the monitor in place, and they worked exactly as planed. This is also the first time I had tested an actual version of the video. I'll post a bit about that process soon. Here's what I wrote about it on instagram: Monitor frame prototype is a success, so glad to have Cody Hughes working on this with me. Video tests are coming along well, too. Excited to get this finished for #BOS2015

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Holding the monitors in place was the trickiest part of the piece from the beginning, and at this point I hadn’t worked out how the monitors would attach to the structure or how the monitor frames would be made. My first idea was to extend the angle bars at the top of each frame to connect with each tier. Then I though it would be good to make the bars separate pieces that would bolt onto both the structure and the frames. The I thought of attaching bars to the VESA mounts that would connect to different  Then I though I’d just use airplane cable. I probably thought of some other things, too, but none of them added up to a concrete plan yet.

After Cody and I talked about my first monitor frame design, which I’d proposed we make out of channel bars with a removable top that the monitors would slide into (!), he suggested an open back design out of welded angle bar. This would let us avoid having to solve for the irregular shape of the monitors backs, and the forward tilt would help hold the monitors in the frame without much additional effort. We just needed to figure out how to pin the monitor in position so that the screen edge and the frame edge lined up. The first three diagrams above were my proposed solution. It involved a two tiered wooden block at that would screw into the corner of each frame and hold the monitor in position.

The concept turned out well, though Cody’s implementation was more effective. He moved the blocks to the middle of each frame edge and elongated them so that they made more contact with the monitor, and proposed lining the block with felt for a tight and flexible fit. He made a prototype out of wood to test the interior dimensions and the blocks, which I’ll post images of soon.

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I made a test video to determine a few things about the video: the shape and angles I would have to make the image of One Court Square conform to, the rate of speed that the tower would appear to climb, and whether my players could each playback consistently enough to make the image appear continuous. 

I arranged the two largest monitors on the floor with a small gap between them and made a few measurements. I had already taken a lot of photos of One Court Square’s facede that I hoped I could use to make the video,  so I checked the measurements against my photos and put together a wireframe of what I thought the shape if the image could be. The photos of the building’s terraced corners were the most dynamic, so I decided to make the shape with that perspective in mind.

The players performed well and would definitely be up to running the four videos. The photos I took turned out to me less useful. Most were taken from within a block of the building and the angles were too acute, so I’d need to take new photos with the angles I’d worked out in mind. The speed was off, too. I wanted the building to appear to move slowly, but the placing in the test felt glacial at this scale.

On to figuring out the monitor frame design.

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These are several pages of the design document I worked up shortly after my first test of the monitors. I put together all of my thoughts and questions about the construction - overall structure, materials, how to attach, support, and frame the monitors, how to balance the structure and secure it to the floor, and a chart with all of the monitor measurements I took. Cody and I discussed them at length and determined that we first needed to figure out how we were going to make the monitor frames before moving on to the rest of the structure. The monitor design in this document was not workable, so we decided to use slightly smaller angle bar stock to create open back frames. More on that process later.

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Next up was unboxing, measuring, and testing the monitors. I laid down some cardboard in my studio and unpacked each of them, then measured every dimension I had appropriate tools for.

I also needed to test the amount of pixel loss for each monitor. Back in the CRT days, when the screen was a large, heavy vacuum tube, pixel loss made sense. A secure frame was necessary to hold the screen in place, and it was inevitable that it would cut into the image a bit. Now that the screen is just a few layers of polymer with some backlighting, it makes a lot less sense. But there’s always loss, and I wanted to know how much. I made a series of nested rectangles, each 10 pixels smaller in each dimension than the last, and used that to determine the edge of each display. Purchasing monitors that were all the same model class turned out to be a good decision all around. Not only were the physical proportions very similar, the screens and the pixel loss were identical.

The arrangement was a just to get a sense of scale and to see how the monitors would look together. I was quite satisfied and a little wary.

Next up, I needed to determine the dimensions of the structure and figure out how I was going to attach the monitors to it. I could also start making test videos to figure out the shape and pace I wanted to work with.

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Over about 2.5 weeks I bought four TVs. The relentless barrage of Amazon emails and targeted ads lasted about two months.

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I had a rough design for the structure, but needed a few things to move ahead. I first had to decide what monitors to acquire. I knew that I wanted to have a set of monitors that were identical, or nearly identical, hardware. This was more difficult than I thought, as few model series made monitors across the size range (24″ - 50″) that I had originally planned on. The series I had originally specced out was older, and the monitors were unavailable by the time I was ready to buy. I looked for monitors that fit my criteria for over a month before settling on a set of Samsung monitors. They were slightly larger than I’d originally planned on - 55″, 48″, 40″, 32″ - but they looked fantastic, had slim and consistent bezels, and were relatively thin and light.

I also needed someone to help me build the sculpture components. I have little experience working with metal. I asked around for a bit, and my friend Stephen Eakin introduced me to Cody Hughes. Cody is a sculptor, and he has a lot of experience with metal and with structural and kinetic forms. We got together and talked about the project, and after some consideration he decided to work with me on it.

It was time to start buying TVs.

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This is the first version of the structure that I made after I knew I was going to build it. It used a set of monitors and sizes that I specced for the grant application as a basis for the height of it’s sections and would’ve been 11.5′ tall. Close in many ways to what I’m building, so far off in others.

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caveat

I set this blog up to track my progress in building Distributed Risk, the sculpture I wrote and received a Queens Council on the Arts grant for, journal style. That didn’t happen. So I’m going to do right now, in (compressed) chronological order and intersperse it with commentary. In short order I’ll be caught up to the present, and there will be plenty of new material and activity to record in the next few weeks.