Proof of concept

If I had to earn money with some of my leisure time projects, I certainly would need to learn to do better estimates of the time involved. About a week after I prepared all the struts needed for my first geodesic dome, I dared to attempt another proof of concept.

I spend about two hours to make sure that each and every strut retains in the connector, gaffer taping the ends to prevent slipping. I hoped that as long as the structure remained connected, I could assemble it entirely. To my surprise, it worked out well, just the idea to document the build failed.



Next time, I rather trust that I hardly notice the camera working on a minute interval. After 14 minutes I wondered whether the camera worked as desired, and stopped the sequence incidentally... however, it took me somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes to get the structure up, and about 20 minutes to deconstruct the frame again.

Although the hose connectors don't stabilise the structure much during assembly, once everything is in place it feels quite sturdy. I could carry the structure around easily, but I certainly have to skip the idea of decent door opening. If it becomes a shelter, I rather climb through a lower triangle than endangering structural integrity.

Pegging down, probably already at a very early state, might be a good idea as well. I wish a had a tarp around, or better some house wrap, to test the integrity with a bit of wind and a skin. The surface area doesn't seem to big, though I want to have quite a snug cover, repeating the shape of the frame. I can't really say whether I want to trust it even with skin as a shelter, but I'm more than curious to cover it decently.

While I managed to do my directions in some of the various dull stages of this project, I happily forgot about directing today. Yet all the crawling around, squatting and bending has left no pain, the only thing I notice is more exposure to midday sun. Any dome project will offer plenty of opportunity to apply the technique - heaps of repetitive tasks, most of them unfamiliar, so there's heap of opportunity to stop and reason about the means-whereby.

That doesn't in any way mean that I spend much time thinking about the means. It's hard to tell how much end-gaining was involved - I remember being calm and collected most of the time, having time for a chat with a curious passer-by. I felt primed for success, with the absence of real set-backs (two rods slipped out before during the assembly of the final pentagon) not too much exhilaration did express.

I enjoyed some minutes sitting in the shade of the tree in the middle of some sacred geometry I materialised in my neighborhood. Without a skin, a dome provides a space that seems sheltered and open at the same time. an amazing experience.



I couldn't really stand up in it, the apex was about 165 cms (rough estimation, not measured), which means that in 2v dome the radius approximates the height quite well. So as long as I don't tackle the stability problem (or the strut length), it's rather a personal shelter than a communal space.

The next challenge is finding some clever material for the skin and testing the stability under wind... Still haven't found a shop that sells Tyvek, and shelling out $90 for some other house wrap doesn't tempt me yet. I need about 30 sqm's for the skin and ground cloth, with about 10% waste included.

It has been an amazing adventure so far. From building smaller models to go large-scale, dealing with all the set-backs on the way, finding flaws and eliminating them. I know it's still a long way into my own dome home, yet it's feasible.

Free serving

I managed to forget setting my alarm, without breakfast and a bit of a haste I arrived about half an hour late in school. Although 'being late' used to be one my personal no-nos, I still did the few things I wanted to do, and laid down on a table for semi-supine, instead of being worried and apologetic about my mishap.

Jen's student didn't arrive in time, and so she asked to work with me. Her hands helped me release a lot excess tension in my legs, and connect me a bit more from head to toe. I returned to the table soon, and then Carina worked with my shoulders and head, while first Ria and then David gave her a bit more up. What a great start into the day.

The turn with Bronwyn gave me the opportunity to experience a more consistent up in walking, although I had a hard time inhibiting my desire to feel out the ease I noticed. Without embodying ideas they literally cannot make sense, and a good amount of continuity and repetition is usually needed to achieve this.

Ann's anatomy class had some sad undertone, it was her last visit as regular anatomy teacher. We studied gait again, playing around with different ideas of bad use while walking. Entertaining and enlightening at the same time.

Stop thinking?

Yesterday I ran into an interesting controversy about thinking. There is a definite desire in some people to 'stop thinking', but I suggested that you will have to be dead to achieve this. Luckily, we moved onto a different topic instead of getting into a senseless debate.

I define 'thought' as specific, repeatable nervous system pattern that accompanies muscular movement. In this way I presume that the activity of the autonomous nervous system is 'thinking' as well. This very technical definition allows me to avoid consciousness for a moment, and it also implies the peaceful coexistence of simultaneous thoughts. Ornamental decorations in mosques can give you an idea of the complexity of thinking in any given moment, a variety of interwoven patterns creating a whole. To make this analogy closer to experiental reality, you will have to animate the ornament.

Fractal imagery suits also well to represent the intrinsic combination of order and chaos. We don't need to be aware of our life-preserving patterns like heart beat or breathing, yet we don't gain any advantage by labelling those processes 'non-thought'.

In terms of Alexander Technique, meddling with breathing or heart beat would have been most likely called 'interference' by the master himself, and in most cases rightly so. People do all sort of things when you ask them 'to take a deep breath', imposing 'conscious' thoughts how to take a deep breath over the 'unconscious' thought deriving from the carbon monoxide level in the blood.

I admit, this extensive definition of 'thinking' contradicts the cultural habit to link 'consciousness' or 'awareness' to thought. Usually the verbalizing part of the neuronal fireworks is considered 'thinking'. Following this idea strictly, music and other art forms would be thoughtless.

Experience always exceeds any verbal description of it. The words I type here are not only shaped by the verbalizing faculty of my brain, but at the same time i have to breath, keep myself upright and move my fingers over the keyboard. The quality of the last three 'thoughts' influences immediately the quality of the 'verbal output' or consciously verbalizing thinking.

Stopping to think from this perspective means death. Stopping the internal dialogue is how I understand the desire to 'stop to think', and from my experiences as not too persistent meditator I can easily empathize with this desire. As much as I can consciously release the tension in my neck, I can consciously release the tension created by holding onto thoughts I become aware of, but those skills need to be learned.

This might sound like pure semantics. This broad definition of thinking would require additional considerations about the level of awareness/consciousness involved in different thoughts, however, it still would make 'stopping to think' equal to sudden death. Inhibition might not be the best suited word to decribe how not to get caught in habitual loops of our verbalizing faculty, it works for me as long as I haven't found a better one.

Taming the beast

One peculiar thing about Alexander Technique you cannot 'do' it. Do whatever you like. When you observe yourself in doing, apply the means-whereby while doing, you're using the skills Alexander Technique teaches.

However, having an excellent MacDonald style teacher in the school can look a bit like one can 'do the technique'. Nili's directions are precise and efficient, and we went through a lot of 'traditional' approaches like chair work, table work, hands on the back of a chair, monkey, lunge and finally the whispered aah.

Just watching Nili made it easy to give myself directions and keep myself up, the increased amount of 'uptime' might have led to the bit of discomfort between my shoulder blades. Or maybe just my bad use while taming a beast, namely a biggish tensegrity sphere.

I found in a cheap shop decorative bamboo struts with a nice dark red colour, together with some Sisal garden string. I build a lot of 6-strut symmetrical tensegrities lately, with a variety of connection methods and tension elements, so I started off with 50 cm rods and about 120 cm string. Sawing the grooves with the Dremel becomes more and more routine, although I find myself often crouched over the work piece.

I experimented with tying the strings to the rod, and making loops with knots to slide the ends through. This would save me sawing 60 grooves into the 30 elements, for the prize of 120 knots. A lot of repetitive activity, a great challenge to consider how to do it easiest. I was eager enough to prepare all elements before the assembly, a strategy I changed soon.

Some of the loops were too big, there wasn't enough tension on the strings, and the ends could slide around. The beautiful idea of easy reusability didn't work out. Back to grooves. The next attempt used sisal strings, but as some of it ripped too easy under tension I went back to nylon line.

I cut the strings so that they had nearly no slack - this might work with more elastic strings, but after about 15 struts it became obvious that it rather break than bend into a sphere. As there is no way of lengthening too short strings, the next set of strings needed preparing. To break the monotony of preparing everything at once, I prepared 5 struts at a time (there's six building stages requiring each time 5 struts).

The first two attempts were still too long, and I waited a day without doing anything before I went with the final approach. The water balloons I used to prevent the strings from sliding were easier to attach than the rubber ring wrapping I used most of time. Unfortunately, they came as easily of again.

The youtube video that inspired me in first place shows an assembly within about five minutes. I spend already the third afternoon and still wasn't sure if everything would fall into place. As the waterballoon failed as security, I looped the string once around the strut before using a rubber band wrapper. I must have started building a sphere at least a dozen times, I know now how to connect the elements with maybe referring to one of the models. I wouldn't be surprised to rediscover the build pattern as weaving pattern.

The skewer model gained stability after stage 4, it get itself balanced on five struts as dome. I got fairly confident when I managed to move the model from its gymball 'mould' onto its own feet. The sculpture rolled in elliptical shape on the floor, I leaned with my body against it to attach the remaining struts. I assembled the final five struts as a pentagon, and carefully slid it into the still wobbly dome.




The pentagon needed 10 connections, after attaching half of them I could turn the model around and do the last connections. I even dared to leave them unsecured. The model flattened still a bit, so I removed some of rubber wrappers and looped previously unlooped connections, decreasing the overall string length slightly thus increasing the tension.

I wouldn't roll it downhill now, but it hangs nicely on a single hook on the wall. Tuning was fairly easy, so I might remove the remaining security rubbers for an overall fine tuning. For now, I rather keep it untouched for some time to see whether it tends to undo itself.

That's it, that's it!

For the next two weeks Nili Bassan visits our school, but I had a good chance to apply the technique even before then. Last night my world map fell off the wall, taking down no less than five tensegrity sculptures with it. Naturally, or so it seems, my latest project, a 30-strut sphere, unfolded again.

So I exercised patience, delayed my desire for a quick fix, and went to school. The turn with Jenny eased me a lot, and her idea to feel amused rather than irrated by the asymmetrical way of using my body helped with this a lot.

The hands-on group with Jenny offered more interesting experiences. I worked with Alysha, and surprised myself by a mixture of old doing habits and some surprisingly effective directing.

In Nili's group I partnered up with Jane Azul, continuing basically where we left off with Jenny. I got quite nervous when Nili came to work with us, however, I picked up some valuable information of some of the 'extra' I put in when putting hands on.

Spherical hysterical

The transformation from sticks and strings into three dimensional structures still stuns me. And provides me with ample opportunity to learn about my end-gaining tendencies.

Producing the elements required to build this airy structures meant that I had to some repetitive activities with a specific target in mind: precision. I noticed that especially the flexibility of the tension elements provides some leeway for the measurements, having quite uniform elements simply eases construction.



With a closer look you can see rubber band along the compression elements, I used those to prevent the nylon string from slipping out of the grooves. The model was quite sturdy yet bouncy, and I decided to take the 'safety rubber' off. At some point my ambitions backfired, and sphere flattened into a sheet. Bummer.

The construction of the sphere was quite straight forward, but I realised that not all the grooves were narrow enough to hold the string in place, I delayed the next construction attempt until better tools arrived.

It took only a week until a set of diamond blades arrived, and instead of using 6mm wooden dowels I took some large bamboo skewers. Again, I had to manufacture more than 30 identical elements to build my sphere, this time using transparent elastic string as tension element.



It took two or three attempts, and a bowl to provide some initial curvature to build this model, and this time it remained stable after removing any rubber band used to prevent slipping. It even survived inserting a balloon on the inside, to provide some more photographic attraction.

The balloon decided its fate. I build a small tensegrity base for the sphere, and took some photos on the outside, utilizing sunlight.



Slight gusts were sufficient to get the sphere rolling off its base, and I when placed the sculpure in front of the next backdrop a gust dropped it to the pavement, where it collapsed. Well, I got it together once, and I already have the next idea how to tackle my string slipping out of groove problem can be handled. At least, I got into the habit of taking photos of the finishing stages of my tensegrity before I do further experiments or 'improvements' with them.

Rubberband man

Nearly 5 metres of wooden dowel were waiting to be transformed, for weeks. I wanted to build to tensegrity sphere, as precursor for a model of an eye. I found a great demonstration how to do this, yet it meant a departure from my prior ways of attaching the tension elements.

Many small models made of units that combine a tensile and compressive element, which basically offers a bit more flexibility than the 'tension loops' I used before. The loops, on the other hands, reflect some of the 'Great circles' created by rotation.

Like so often, I departed a bit from the original measurements, using thicker dowels makes the sphere less 'airy' than the model in the youtube video. The biggest challenge was precision this time, I had to saw a groove to hold the string at both ends of the dowels.

Using my new Dremel, I went through some cutting blades, luckily wearing goggles that saved me from the first violently disintegrating blade. I still haven't got the proper gizmo for wood cutting, and the different blades I used produced different wide and deep grooves. Also, I didn't glue the strings to the dowels, so some became easily undone.

My first attempts to assemble the sphere failed badly. Most grooves were so wide that the strings slipped out easily, so after some frustrating trials I called it a day. I had made 32 elements (the sphere needs 30), and wondered if I could use them for something, at the same time thinking about simple solutions to overcome the slipperyness.

Again, rubber bands saved my day. The models I build with them deteriorate quite fast, but as temporary solution they worked wonders. I secured each connection between the units with a rubber band, and, voila, I could follow the demonstration video nearly step by step to success. Unfortunately, this went much faster than my camera batteries recharged. Before I'm brave enough to see whether the sphere will survive without any rubber bands, I'll wait to document the first bouncy bit.