Artifact 1 (Renny Hyde, 2025)

Materials: wood, glass, wire, LEDs

Processes: carving, tumbling, bending, soldering

Field notes: On its top side, a gentle green glow rises from a shell of sea glass. It's body is a pale, warm wood. A city of interlocking wires form a lattice below, which emerge from the aether.

WPKT's resident ethereo-archaeologist* says there's some debate on the purpose of this artifact; From some angles, it resembles an insect on 8 legs, so perhaps it is a children's toy, or a piece of home decor. The underside looks like a constellation or a communication network, so maybe this is a map.

*Name omitted

Making-Of

This project was my first experiment in wood carving, which is something I've been wanting to try for a while. I started with a chunk of bass wood that came with my wood carving kit. To get the overall shape I slowly whittled away along the pencil lines I drew. In retrospect, I should have hacked a rough shape out of the wood with an axe and then carved from there, since carving from the start took me around 3 hours.

Next I selected some shards of glass that I tumbled in my rock tumbler for about 7 days to make sea glass. These pieces came from an olive oil bottle. After tracing them onto the face of the wood, I set out on the arduous task of gouging out the holes I would seat them in. I swore to myself that I would never do this by hand again, and plan on using a laser cutter (or finding a better method).

Once I (finally) finished carving out those indentations, I drilled holes in each of them that were about the width of an LED. I got super lucky because the LED fit absolutely perfectly on the other side of the hole. Then I just had to glue the gems in place, and the main body was done.

I stayed pretty close to the original design, but obviously changed the orientation.

This was my first time woodcarving, so I got poked a few times...

Over in the electronics lab, I started by gluing all of the LEDs in place, keeping them all in the same orientation. I brought some solderable breadboards with me, but I wanted to go with a more elegant wire lattice, inspired by Eirik Brandal's sound sculptures (eirikbrandal.com). To do this, I stripped the insulation off of some single core wire leftover from the Auditory Mirror. Then, I clamped the wire in a drill on one end and held it with some pliers in the other, twisting it until it was straight and rigid. The power rail was straight, with the positive pins of the LEDs bending to meet it. I bent the ground rail into a zig-zag to meet the LED pins because I thought it gave some more visual interest. Then I just soldered the power and ground to a barrel jack (with a resistor of course) and it was ready for any DC power supply!