Productivity Wheel

After researching for different kinds of movements, I decided to make an artwork inspired by the movement of kinetic art.

Art Movement: Kinetic Art

Kinetic art is art that depends on motion for its effects. Since the early twentieth century artists have been incorporating movement into art. This has been partly to explore the possibilities of movement, partly to introduce the element of time, partly to reflect the importance of the machine and technology in the modern world and partly to explore the nature of vision.

Concept

In this pandemic, the COVID-19, it is difficult to be productive during a crisis. The time and energy spent on adjusting to the new normal are magnifying intense emotion. Pandemic anxiety is making us sleepless, forgetful, and depressed. There are some thoughts on productivity during this pandemic: we can either be productive and stay focus, or there are numbers of things working against accomplishing our tasks.

Productivity can be healthy and unhealthy. Healthy productivity is staying productive within our own limitations, this increases self-worth and also positive emotions. While unhealthy productivity is when one overdoes or under. This leads to feeling stress, burn out, and low self-worth. The pressure to be productive impacts mental health. The message that I want to tell is be productive in accordance to your capacity by maintaining a good timeline planning and schedule. When this is not applied, you are forcing yourself to be productive and this can lead to depression, stress, and anxiety.

I want to apply kinetic art in my artwork as it can represent productivity. Productivity relates to ‘moving’. In some kinetic artworks, it is physically not moving but in the viewer’s eye it moves, visually. When you focus, you can see it moving unconsciously, but when you ignore it, it stays, unmoved.

Mood-board

Sketches

Inspiration

Theory of the Spinning Wheel

The wheel is covered in the primary and secondary colors, but when you spin the wheel, the rainbow colors vanish to white.

How?

The colors are all there, they’ve just mixed together. The rapid spinning of the Disappearing Color Wheel causes the colors to “blend” into each other. This blending creates the illusion that they’re actually white!

Light is all of the colors in one: white. When the wheel spins up to the right speed, the colors blend into a near-recreation of white light. This “white” wheel is created because your eyes cannot keep up with the rapid rate at which the individual colors are spinning!

Experiment on Material

I tried different material of the wheel namely poly-foam and cardboard. When I tried spinning the wheel with the poly-foam based wheel, it is too light so it did not spin smoothly. On the contrary, the cardboard wheel spin perfectly.

On my first try of spinning the wheel, I used a hemp rope which was too rough and the wheels did not spin smoothly. Then I tried changing it to a cotton string which works better than the hemp rope and made the wheel turn smoothly.

Experimenting on Coloring Material

For coloring the wheels, I tried different coloring tools such as crayon, marker, and acrylic paint. The crayon wheel has some excess pieces of crayons and when I turned it some spots fade. For the marker, the color does not spread equally as well as the other materials. I decided to use acrylic paint for the end product.

Experiment for the Wheel

When the lighting is not enough, or dark, the result of the spin is just a combination of the colors instead of the color white.

When there is more light available, the wheel will slowly turn white as it spins at the right pace.

Step by Step

Firstly, make the circle for the wheel by using a drawing compass. Cut the circle according to the guideline and fold it into 6 parts.

Next I painted the circle red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple by following the guidelines of the folded area. I repeated the steps above and made another circle. Stick both of the paper circles onto a circular cardboard with the same size.

To insert the colored wheel, I dismantled the wheels by taking the bolt off using a nose plier.

Then I poke a hole on the center of the circle using a pencil. After the hole is made, insert the hole onto the bolt and make sure it is secured and tight.