Art in motion

Most works of art, whether painted, drawn, sculpted, or assembled, are motionless. Metal artist Ed Kidera makes stationary items from time to time, but most of his works are dynamic in some way.

“Most of my work does something,” he said.

He didn’t start his career with art in mind. His background includes a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, and in addition to his career as an equipment designer, he spent some time teaching diving classes. When he was teaching, he found that he could get a distracted student’s attention with a sharp rap against a scuba tank.

Scuba tanks don’t last forever, so Kidera wondered if he could put a decommissioned tank to good use. He took one home, cut it in half, and fashioned a bell out of it. It wasn’t long before he had worked up a decorative motif, installed a clapper, and hung it from a frame he made from some tubing (see Figure 1). Since then he has produced nearly 6,000 such bells, each one numbered and signed.

Kidera was surprised and pleased to find that tanks for other uses are available in an astounding variety of shapes and sizes. Some specialty medical gases come in tanks not much larger than a quart-sized soda bottle. Scuba, propane, and common fire extinguishers fill out the middle of the size range. Among the biggest tanks Kidera found is a halon fire extinguisher, typically used in a computer room or other area with electronic gear that can’t tolerate exposure to water. Intended to be stationary, the tank is too big to swing like one of Kidera’s typical bells, but he made a bell from one anyway. He also made a mallet so the owner can strike it like a gong.

He put a bit of his engineering background to use in his second career. Employed at the Johns Hopkins University—Applied Physics Laboratory in the 1970s and ’80s, he designed motion compensation systems for towed sensors for ocean research. An ocean’s characteristics don’t always change gradually as the depth changes, Kidera explained. Thermoclines, haloclines, and pycnoclines are thin layers of relatively abrupt changes in temperature, salinity, and density, respectively. The normal heave of a ship in heavy seas would cause a towed sensor to change depth rapidly, occasionally moving through a cline, disrupting the sensor’s data collection process, and in some cases rendering the data useless. Kidera designed and built electromechanical systems that compensate for the ship’s motion so that a peak-to-trough heave of 20 feet would change the sensor’s depth just a few inches.

Kidera doesn’t build anything that sophisticated for his bells, but he used some of the same principles when he developed a series of bells that rock rather than swing, which he calls rocker bells. Each bell is counterbalanced so that, once put into motion, it rocks and rocks and rocks as though it will never run out of steam, like a well-designed pendulum.

“On a pendulum, the longer the arm, the longer the period,” Kidera said, explaining how to design one for the longest duration of back-and-forth motion. His rocker bells use the same principles—gravity and inertia—but the pivot point is between two nearly equal masses.

“Anyone can make one with a short period,” he said. “To make the period as long as possible, you have to locate the pivot point as close as possible to the center of gravity.” This is easier said than done, and when it is done, the bell still might need some adjustment. If the masses aren’t aligned with each other vertically, the bell doesn’t hang vertically when at rest. Getting it just right can be a tedious process requiring several adjustments, heating the counterbalance with a torch and tapping it with a hammer.

Artistic Amplifiers and More

Kidera’s work is much more than bells. In keeping with the idea that his creations should have a function, he often guts old radios, updates them with an off-the-shelf audio amplifier, and adds a horn to channel the sound (see Figure 2). After that it’s a matter of connecting an iPod® or anything else with a 1⁄8-in. headphone jack, and voila! It plays music.

Some of his pieces don’t have a function, but look like they do. The steampunk movement, a combination of science fiction and art that embraces steam-powered machinery, caught Kidera’s attention years ago and it shows up in many of his pieces. Influenced by the writings of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and other 19th-century science fiction writers, steampunk pieces often depict technologies envisioned more than 100 years ago, but even now aren’t technologically or economically viable (see Figure 3).

So the next time you see art in motion and it looks a lot like a reused fire extinguisher, or you see something that implies motion like a levitating skateboard, look closely. If it has the initials EK on it, it’s one of Ed Kidera’s pieces.

Ed Kidera, 3591 Hipsley Mill Road, Woodbine, MD 21797, 410-489-0431, kidera@earthlink.net, www.kiderafineart.com