When exploring a new medium, my tendency is to compare it to known territory, maybe to have some ideas in mind about what’s possible, what would be interesting, to desire control over chaos. For Carbon Garden, our research took the form of visits to botanical gardens, conservatory of flowers, nature walks, science museums, and lots of google image searches for flowers of all varieties. Next came classes in carbon fiber layup, interviews of everyone and anyone who had worked with it before, and of course YouTube video searches like the one about making carbon fiber cellos.

As we started experimenting with the medium itself, a vast array of uncharted territory began to evidence itself: epoxy type, cure time and temperature, carbon fabric weave and weight, mold release whether peel ply, spray, wax or mylar.  Any different combination of these possibilities would lead to very different results, most of them very unflower-like.  Plus it’s difficult, time consuming and quite expensive to just play around with these materials.  You’d think, contact the experts, they’ll know what to do.  But even people who make many strong and beautiful structures from carbon fiber usually aren’t making things enough like ours to say exactly what we should do.

Little by little we’ve edged our way toward a satisfying petal building technique including compound curves, surface details, reasonable strength, and impressively, a smooth matte finish with that beautiful grain looking sharp on both sides.  So good, we have successfully gained control over a wily new medium.  The problem is we have not let it breathe.

What I mean is that in our desire to master our technique with this material, we forgot to ask the question, “What does the carbon fiber want?”  I mean this in no sappy anthropomorphic way, and no I haven’t been sniffing the epoxy (on purpose).  As I have come to play with this black fabric that wets out to a stretchy skin with its own qualities and behaviors, little intimations of its own nature have surfaced.

I now see that the frayed edges I had thoroughly taped and held together, when laid up with epoxy turn into delicate plantlike spines.  I now see that techniques more akin to clothing design work to build three dimensional self-wrapping structures, like black hole models of space-time.  The bizarre and quirky qualities of this medium are starting to express themselves, and tell us what kind of art to make.

A handheld carbon fiber black hole.

I don’t know where exactly this will lead, but I’m shedding my preconceived notions and allowing the medium to show me.  My failure will only be not to listen closely enough to what it’s saying.  And if I’m lucky when it’s quiet I hope to become close enough friends that it’s willing to share its deepest secrets.

While the blooms of Carbon Garden will be made from carbon fiber, we’ve decided to build the stems out of steel.  It’s so nice to get back to a material we understand!  Here’s a sketch by Eric Nguyen of a strategy for adding detail to the stems and a way to make wireframe leaves.

The red lines are the bent-steel tubing. The black ones are a thin material (copper piping? steel wire?) bent around and welded/brazed together to make more intricate, organic shapes around the fixed-diameter stem. The thin material can also be bent into leaf-shapes and can continue up the undersides of the petals.

Meanwhile Andy Lee drew up CAD models for a system to attach the petals together into a bloom and the flame effect to the stem.

We’re fully underway with carbon fiber flower petal production.  In addition we’ll start bending and hammering steel stems in the forge pretty soon, and we’ve got decent mechanical designs for the interfaces to hold petals, leaves and stems together.  On the flame effect side, our Flame Elements now have built in ultrasonic rangefinders that auto shutoff if people get too close.  The garden is laid out  to allow good participant flow but prevent cars from driving in there.

Here are some renderings by Andy Lee showing how a simple petal shape can be repeated and attached at different points to create a wide variety of flowers.

Any opinions or ideas you’d like to pass to us?  Also, if anyone knows people who are interested in learning how to lay up carbon fiber, we’re getting pretty good at it these days and always welcome visitors to the shop.  False Profit Labs workshop days are Wednesdays from 6-10pm and Saturdays from 1-5pm in San Francisco.  Early versions of Carbon Garden will appear at the American Steel opening party and Fire Arts Festival in July.  Email: brett at false dash profit dot com if you want to get involved.

Rendering of Carbon Garden at Burning Man by Erik Walker

Every morning of the weekend, we spent a couple of hours guiding Coachella campers through making their first fire sculpture! Here’s a photo of one of the final flame trees…see more photos on the false profit labs flickr group