Visualizing Impossible Machines: Leonardo Da Vinci & Perpetual Motion. A creative solution to celebrate in 2019 the 500 year anniversary of the death of Leonardo Da Vinci
- Submitting institution
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Ravensbourne University London
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- MS02
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Art installations
- Open access status
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- Month
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- Year
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The work submitted for assessment consists of installations exhibited at two venues. Two prototype installations were exhibited at the Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck University, from the 6th February to 12th March 2019, in an exhibition entitled “Visualising Perpetual Motion Machines”.
The third installation was incorporated into a much larger exhibition, entitled, “Leonardo da Vinci and Perpetual Motion”, at the Museo Galileo in Florence. Here the animations were shown in a revised form.
The outputs are supported with a contextual information template attached in a PDF format. Our contextual information template incorporates a section called ‘Output and Description’ which identifies and describes the submitted output for evaluation (as listed above). The sections of the template that follow provide contextual information, such as research narrative, funding, dissemination, reception, which accompany the submitted output.
The exhibited works contribute to our understanding of two of Leonardo’s manuscripts exploring perpetual motion designs. The research resulted in animations that, like Leonardo’s drawings, are fictions. Leonardo explored the possibilities of self-perpetuation on paper, based on current knowledge of motion at that time. My research was carried out using the technologies of my time, 2D and 3D computerisation techniques and augmented reality. The system I built had physical properties built into it that, when we applied initial energy, within our natural world’s physical laws would always result in stasis. Instead what we animated is what the physics would need to be for Leonardo’s design to work. We created a world where perpetual motion would work. Our evidence, established by creating an environment outside of our planet’s gravitational laws, is further re-enforced by us establishing the exact point where Leonardo’s design, Forster 91v, meets resistance. These new contributions add to our understanding of Leonardo’s design thinking and suggest that they are better understood as ingenious but, nevertheless, inherently flawed proto-types.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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