New work by Antonio Filipo, Leilani Kake, Sean Kerrigan, Mele Penitani, Genevieve Pini and Siliga David Setoga at Fresh Gallery Otara | November 2008

Sunday, September 7, 2008

This and that: Mon the 9th in the mornin'.


I suppose I should start out by saying that this post may be an excuse as to why I can't be at the next meeting this coming saturday. The first meeting when we actually have to come up with goods and I won't be there. Why?, why not!


No really, theres a bunch of stuff going on and I don't think I'll be able to spare the time. No 1 is that the day after is the last day for the Objective sculpture cum Manukau's answer to sophistication competition. But who am I to question the value of a comp that every year has a different name and a wider scope. So everybody knows about my unending gripe that Manukau should spend more effort on its own artists than trying to look, to the rest of the country, like they are. Beside the point - which is? Oh, so I'm going to be busting my tail to get stuff finished for it and won't be at the meeting.

I don't really have to bust my ass because I have enough stuff in reserve to enter a few bits and hardly raise a sweat, but I can't do it that way, thats too easy and wouldn't have me treading that infernal line between ultimate disaster and world resounding success!

I've got a chair out at Monterey I'll put in it. I think I've got a photo of it on facebook.
You'll have to go to the page to see it.
And I've got a table that I'll put a new top on. A wooden top with engineering bits carved in and backfilled with resin.



Okay, just spent time cutting and pasting the html 'cause these sites always stuff it up, anyways, you'd think these two would be enough but no I've got something else in mind that needs to be built from the ground up and involves a coffee machine and a old black and white TV. You see, I found this thing on the net, in an electronics forum, where you can circuit bend an old TV where the vertical and horizontal hold voltages are on the cathode ray tube. It makes it into something like an oscilloscope and the plan is to have the coffee machine set up with an extra temperature switch on the body that turns on, closes, at 70 degrees celsius, which is the switch to turn on a bunch of 555 timer IC's wired to do the star trek alarm signal. This signal is played as audio but it's also hooked up to the TV so the signal starts playing on the screen. But the TV itself has been on, idling away at the wall voltage through a transformer and a coupla resistors to drop the voltage right down.

Why bother? The thing you gotta understand, or just stand around with your mouth hanging open and a vacant look in your eyes, is that this thing will be DANGEROUS! High voltage, the flyback transformers ( which is actually more like a choke coil) feeding the anode in the TV is at about 1000V or 1kV and running at about 50 - 100mA which is 50 - 100 Watts (and given the High voltage it'll easily get into the heart region and the current will stop it) and a boiler... all of it together in an open frame with only cursory attempts at making it safe. Why again? Because I want to be the first to put real dangerous stuff in a Manukau art exhibition.

Actually it won't be dangerous at all. Possibly dangerous, it'll certainly look dangerous, but really just dangerous if somebody whos really stupid does something really stupid like throw water at it when its turned on.

Meanwhile the deadline for an exhibition at Uxbridge about cars is two weeks after that so as soon as the bits are dropped off at Nathan it'll be home to start painting. As usual, last minute and all that, I'll be just adapting a new style that suits my own, and taking a very big leaf outta this guys book.

So your thinking that thats enough to keep any man busy but theres also the fact that Mum's back from Canada next tuesday, which means I have to build some cabinets at home before she gets back and tidy up the house, and write an article for an online magazine about circuit bending. They want me to write about something I made last week for my weekly music things at the Vitamin S at the Wine Cellar.

So I actually started this post because I was going to use it to write the article so the guy in Canada, from Toronto (theres a reason for that too)could preview it but I haven't even started yet and I have to go right now to the WINZ office and report so I'll get into it when I get back. All in all, that time of the year, so I may not be there on saturday folks, oh, maybe I'll drop in with Gene's sculpture which she came over and did yesterday. Who knows?

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