{ Set 1 Set 2 Set 3}

When The Neuron Chamber showed last week at The Crucibles Fire Arts Festivle one aspect of the piece that generated some of the strongest reactions (both positive and negative) was the shade of purple what we painted the whole piece.

Bellow I’ve posted some photos as it was being painted by my good friends Team Grunditz and, in the spirit of disclosing (most) of the nitty-gritty of the design and fabrication process I wanted to say a few words about why we painted it this way.

From the day that Ben and I started to think about this piece one aspect that we put allot of thought into was the finish.

Were we going to leave all the steel raw, exposed and clearly worked on? Were we going to age the metal with various chemicals and rusting agents to make it appear older then it was? Should we paint it? Should we paint it and then rust it (like we did for the roof of the Steampunk Treehouse) or should we leave the paint fresh?

You can see there were many option and each option would, thematically and stylistics, take the piece in a different direction.

It largely depended on what story we wanted to tell.

One of the original set of themes that we had wanted to push included: alien, industrial and science fiction.

We began to image this was an industrial, scientific device from an alien culture used to study a set of robotic neurons.

One of the fist decision we made was to paint rather then rust the steel. We then quickly decided to do an industrial paint job in which the entirety of the device, bolts and all, would get painted a solid color.

The question then became: what color?

We knew we wanted to to be alien looking and we also knew we did not want people to have many preconceived ideas about what they were looking at.

If we had painted it army green people would think it was some military device. If we had painted it institutional green, people would have thought it came form some mental hospital. If we had painted it black it would convey notions of secrete, area 51 type projects.

In the end we had several swatches of color in the red, blue, green and purple ranges. We then arrowed ourselves down to the light shades of all these colors as the had the most technical and industrial look to us.

But the one color that had very little association with anything at all like objects like this is purple.

Then we looked down at the swatch name and saw that the shade of purple we liked most was called “giggles” and we were sold. Giggles it would be.

We were going to paint it giggles, expose the steel on the high spots and then intentionally age those spots just a bit with some rusting agents to make it look as if it had been kicking around for some time.

But in the end because of time constraints and because we could not find a satisfying shade of rust we decided that we would instead only put on a light coat of paint and the allow it to wear down and age naturally.

I’m excited to see what it looks like in a year.

Leslie preparing the chamber for the giggles.

Leslie and Ake working the giggles.

Ake and Namoi Grunditz painting

The legs all giggled up. I love the way the legs look. Here you can see that they have been capped with endnuts.

Jo Slota carefully cutting the slot in the axon.

Here you can see the end of the axon that is exposed in the chamber. The passive pulley on the end allow the ball chain to return around to the drive sprocket that is hidden in the end caps. Because the entire axon assembly (including the pulley) is effectively on of the high voltage terminals it needs to be electrically isolated from everything. In this photo you can see the black, Delrin disc the separates the axon from everything else.

Here you can see the other end of the axons, where they attach to the drive sprockets and motors, which are also electrically isolated with Delrin.

Ben Carpenter getting ready to cut the hole for the interface box on the end cap.