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This document serves as a living document of the vision behind Mind Garden, our plan, what progress we’ve made and what skills & materials we’re looking for.
If you’re interested in helping out with designing/building this sculpture, please reach out to us on Discord! Let us know what you’d like to work on and what related experience you have. We’d love some extra hands!
~ PRISM Collective
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We’re a group of students passionate about bridging the gap between engineering, tech, and artistic expression, providing a community and resources for students to combine their technical skills with creative passions.
Currently, our goal is to create some functional prototypes for our first sculpture by the end of this term. We have initial funding and support to access the prototyping materials and spaces at UW that should be more than enough to get us going so our focus during the F24 term is on prototyping!
Our long-term objective is to become a student design team, where students can take initiative and build out their own creative visions for art installations that can be displayed through both internal and external exhibitions.
(Working Name)
Our first piece is a kinetic sculpture is inspired by the human mind… a vibrant, ever-changing ecosystem of thoughts, emotions, and ideas. We want to evoke feelings of wonder, awe and curiosity as people interact with the sculpture, which will be primarily abstract, with a whimsical feel to it. A key part of the sculpture is its interactive component (see Interactive Component (planning in progress!)), meant to give a unique and exciting experience to each of its audience members.
Below is a mind map of the subsystems of the human mind that we want to represent in our sculpture, featuring preliminary motif brainstorming.
From the above map, we’ve selected a few subsystems (see sections below), to be integrated into a base structure composed of several rotating gear-like platforms. Most of the subsystems will sit atop their own platform, though we are considering integrating some of them throughout the entire sculpture (eg. snaking the Rube Goldberg ball and slide structure throughout the different platforms).
The following images are AI-generated concepts for visualization of the sculpture aesthetic, as well as a basic WIP CAD model of the the base structure.
For our first prototype, in the interest of time and resources, we’ll be focusing on building out prototypes for the following subsystems/motifs. There will be a larger focus on R&D and exploration rather than integration and full sculpture completion.