It was the end of my summer vacation, and I had just gotten back to Houston from spending a couple of weeks in Chicago to visit family. Quite frankly, I couldn't have been more excited to come back to Houston. Don't get me wrong, the time I spent in Chicago was amazing. Family Barbecues, pool parties (even though the majority of the time it rained), weather that was never over 75 degrees, and enough hot dogs and pizza for a lifetime--even for a Houstonian. But to me, Houston had a little bit more to offer. In all honesty, what is Chicago's cold summer weather and delicious carb-infested cheesy bread compared to Houston's all mighty Humidity, Chinese food, coffee shops, art shows, and most importantly, HANG at the MFAH?
On my first day back, I immediately started working with a Houston legend and art mentor, Mike Beradino. Husband of the esteemed Jenn Beradino, manager of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston's Kinder Foundation Education Center (KFEC) as well as founder of HANG@MFAH. Mike himself is a well established artist. He is also the lead art mentor at HANG. I could go on for the whole blog about how amazing this guy is, but I will try to sum it up within one paragraph. Mike works with 8 bit technology, arduinos, old-school Nintendo systems, game-boys, 3D Printers, CNC Machines and other digital devices to create his own style of mind blowing digital media. His works have been featured in galleries such as Postmasters Gallery in New York, The Joanna in Houston, and Art House Contemporary Art Center in Austin, TX. He is also one of the coolest punk rockers on this side of Montrose. But for now, let's just talk about art.
After an amazing lunch of burgers and fries, an annoyingly long traffic jam filled with punk rock songs and good times, Mike took me back to his personal studio so that we could work on a project he had recently started.
But before I get into this, how about a quick history lesson?
At the beginning of HANG, we created an art piece we creatively called "The Drawing Robot." What does it do? Well, it's a robot that (you guessed it) draws. Using an arduino Micro controller and a program called Bender, a user is able to upload any photo and convert the picture to X and Y coordinates, which are then sent to the robot to be drawn on a piece of paper.
Pretty Awesome, right?
But not awesome enough.
Mike decided that for his own personal project to take the Drawing Robot to the next level. Instead of using the standard 3'x2' pieces that I was familiar with, we decided to make the drawing a massive 8'x4'. Then, instead of using regular standard pictures, we decided to hack into a 3D scanner and scan people to create massive, realistic 8 foot tall portraits. And so, we spent the next four hours scanning each other to be drawn, fixing previous scans, rebuilding and making small adjustments on the robot, and installing and taking down new paper for drawings to be drawn on (each drawing can take over 8 hours to be drawn, so I was unable to see the robot in action.
After we finished with The Drawing Robot, we passed the time by talking about his dogs and making our own sparkling water using a carbonator he had recently made (why would you pay for your own sparkling water and carbonator when you can make your own?). While we were talking about the physics behind the carbonator, we received a shipment for a power tool he had told me about earlier in the year, a tool we had been salivating over for months.
Taking the concept of a basic CNC machine, we decided to make a huge, industrial sized laser cutter to create large installation and sculptures.
That's right. We got a huge friggin' laser.
One so awesome and magnificent that I thought it was only talked about in science fiction novels.
This laser uses the same concept of The Drawing Robot, using X and Y coordinates to create images that could be made out of materials such as wood or aluminum. These sheets could be as large as 8'x8', and the actual laser could reach an energy of over 3000 watts.
For the rest of the day, we unwrapped each part and started to put the the laser cutter together piece by piece. There couldn't have been a better end to an already amazing day. I am extremely excited to work more with Mike on this projects, and I can't wait until we put the project in action.
-Andrew White