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Tuesday, May 9, 2006 - 3:10 PM
MEM7.4

The Unbearable Lightness of the Cube: Using SMA to Express Lightness, Movement and Memory in Sculptures

R. Gotthardt, Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland; E. Krähenbühl, Atelier Romainmôtier, Romainmôtier, Switzerland

Shape Memory Alloys have been used in sculptures for quite some time. But only very few of these sculptures have gone on to become famous, mainly because the working conditions of the SMA must be carefully respected when sculptures are made. If they are not, the sculpture is bound to fail after a short time. Swiss Artist Etienne Krähenbühl was able to avoid such failure in his sculptures by maintaining a strong collaboration with Rolf Gotthardt, physicist at the EPFL. The apparently low modulus of superelastic material is mainly used to express a very smooth movement of part of the sculptures and in a few cases the shape memory effect allows unexpected changes. In this paper, some of the results of an 8-year collaboration between the physicist and the sculptor will be shown.


Summary: Collaboration Art-Science: A physicist shows how SMA have been used to express an artist's ideas of movement in metall sculpture. Several exemples are shown and the function of the SMA elements are explained in each case.