Megan S - Paper and Motor

I wanted to use destruction as a form of creation - have something delicate and beautiful ripped apart. I want to look at how things can change forever without taking anything away, just simply rearranging and changing shape. My original idea was to have a 6 foot tissue paper sculpture and have multiple motors roaming the floor tearing it down slowly. Since that was very impractical I figured to scale it down and place it all in a box to frame.

I folded and crushed multicoloured tissue paper and created strands using thread. They were all slightly different lengths and colour combination. I taped them to the top of a cardboard box painted black. I taped it somewhat symmetrically so that one part would not tear more than the others. I attached 2 pipe cleaners covered in sandpaper to a servo and taped the servo to the bottom of the box in the middle of the sculpture.


The sculpture didn't tear or rip or get destroyed when showed in class. However, it did get twisted a bit. I decided that the motor should be re-designed, making it taller so it could catch the tissue paper closer to the top of the box and add razors to help with the shredding of the tissue paper. I couldn't find razors that would be usable for this project so I attached tacks to the sandpaper, hoping that it would catch and tear the tissue paper.

It worked a lot better than the original design. It was a lot more tangled and a few pieces of tissue paper fell off. The tacks worked really well in catching the paper and twisting it more than just the sandpaper, but it didn't rip any. I let it run for about 5 minutes and the longer it was running, the more tangled it become. I think that if I kept it running for even longer, more pieces would fall and the shape of the sculpture would be irreversible which is what I wanted to do in the first place.