|
"It's Alive"!
A blatantly, self-serving, unauthorized,
autobiography of noted kinetic artist,
R. Bruce Salinger
Close, But No Cigar
My first un-collaborated creations were more electronic in nature and
included:
Music Sequencer/Synthesizer
I took an old four bit, transistor, counter board and connected it to a
voltage-controlled oscillator of my own design. I fed the output to a
five hundred watt audio amplifier array which was then positioned to
provide my fellow students with some light lunch music. It took about five
minutes for school authorities to determine
the provenance of that celestial choir, that it was not a repeat of the
Roswell Incident and to pull the plug on
my first performance art installation.
|
Helium-Neon Laser
I saved my Christmas, Birthday and lunch money for four years and
purchased a glass tube capped at each
end with dichroic mirrors, filled with the noble gasses helium and neon
and when energized with high voltage
would produce the "purtiest little red beam ya evah did see"! Again, for
the experience-challenged folk reading
this, lasers at that time, were expensive death rays seen in James Bond
movies and not available to mere mortals.
I built the 3000 DC Volt, 5 mA power supply and added a pentode modulator
to transmit voice by light. For this
I received The Rotary Club First Place Science Award.
Home Controller
I built a discreet transistor device that when one clapped one's hands,
would turn OFF or ON up to eight home
appliances. I used it in my home for about a year before I took it apart
because I needed the parts for some
other project. It was about five years later I noticed that late night TV
was filled with ads for something called
"The Clapper". Who knew???
It was around this time that I found myself at a one man show by
noted 60's kinetic artist, Henry Joe Police
at the newly opened Old Town Music Hall in El Segundo, CA. I was
enthralled by the sculptures that gyrated, clicked
and whirred about me. Each sculpture moved with a unique character all its
own...controlled only by micro-switches!
I left the show forever changed by the knowledge that the world was much
bigger than I knew and that there existed
in this world people who are much cleverer
than I.
|
