Nervous System posts
Posts: 12
Files: 56
Hyphae tea lamps
Just a quick update for the Neuron tier! The next reward will be stainless steel Hyphae tea lamps. Each will have a one of a kind pattern generated by our Hyphae software inspired by leaf venation (and mycelial networks). We wanted to create a piece that would let us make something from lasercut stainless steel. More details later!Let me know if you have an opinion on if they should have a base or not
Award Plaques for CMU’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
We recently created a set of sculptural award plaques for a new fund at The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiryat Carnegie Mellon University. The Moore Family Fund for underwriting creativity, knowledge, experimentation, research and yumminess will fund antidisciplinaryundergraduate research (learn more here). Dan Moore(a senior technical artist at NVIDIA) commissioned us to design a unique set of perpetual award plaques that will hold the names of recipients over the next 75 years.Rethinking the Award PlaqueTypical award plaques are simp...
Jupiter Infinity Puzzle
We’re ready to ship the Jupiter Infinity Puzzles to our patrons in the Axon and Nucleus tiers! If your address has changed, please let us know.This puzzle features a high resolution image of Jupiter and our matrix puzzle cut. It's a tiling puzzle in the same manner as our Infinite Galaxy puzzles, Earth and moon puzzles. It has 260 pieces with 5 space themed whimsies: astronaut, hubble telescope, space shuttle, shooting star and satellite. I've shown the puzzle in three different configurations in the photos above but like all our infi...
Polyhex, Butterflies, Jupiter
We've been working on some new puzzles and also livestreaming lasercutting and solving puzzles. We now have a Twitch account where we have been going live each Thursday night starting at 7:30pm EST to solve a puzzle. During the middle of the week, we also stream our lasercutter as it cuts the puzzle we are solving that week. If you follow us on Twitch you will get notified whenever we go live: https://www.twitch.tv/nervouspuzzles. Now onto the new puzzle designs.Polyhex Math PuzzleThe first puzzle we are working on is a Polyhex puzzle. It&#...
Weekly puzzle livestream
We’re starting a weekly livestream on Twitch. Our first stream will be tonight starting at 7:30pm EST. We’ll be hanging out and streaming assembling the Infinite Galaxy Puzzle while chatting and answering questions. How long will it take Jesse to assemble the puzzle that caused Gizmodo to refer to us as “monsters”? We’ll find out!https://twitch.tv/nervouspuzzlesTopologically, the Infinite Galaxy Puzzle maps to a Klein bottle, an impossible 3D shape where the inside and outside are mathematically indistinguishable. What this means is t...
Studio updates - the good and the bad
Hey everyone! so much going on! Updates below on fun things like an immersive exhibit in Germany, new jewelry designs, reward shipping, new sculpture and also updates on bad things like counterfeit puzzles and GPSR shipping woes. We've entered the busy holiday season and are non-stop shipping orders out the door now (including on weekends). This is good because this year has generally been slow. Small businesses like us make a majority of their sales during December. All the radiolaria have shipped except those traveling internationally. Pu...
designing a double-sided flip cut puzzle
We've been working on the design of the first puzzle for the axon tier! Originally, we were thinking of doing a puzzle with our wood inlay experiments but we've hit some roadblocks with that and are postponing the inlay work for a later puzzle. Basically we kept trying to make the inlay finer and finer to get higher image fidelity but that causes a high failure rate and maybe starts to undermine what we were trying to do. Time to switch gears! We're making a double-sided puzzle using our wave cut algorithm inspired by a cardboard pu...
radiolaria jewelry
We've been working on creating some jewelry scale objects inspired by the larger radiolaria 3d-prints. Ideally we will have these finished soon so we can produce a supply in time for the winter holidays. They will be made in sterling silver and brass. It's hard to find the right balance of complexity and size to make these work as jewelry. Bigger means more space for pattern development but makes it less affordable and wearable. Right now we're aiming for as small as possible while still having multiple scales of pattern in each pi...
Work in progress - award plaques
One project we are working on now is an award plaque for a new fund that supports transdisciplinary experiments in the arts and sciences at a university (it hasn't been announced yet so I won't name the award / university). We were asked to make "some kinda of plaque that has space for like 100 names? Made of like walnut or oak?." If you aren't familiar with perpetual awards plaques they look like this:Usually one new name gets added every year. We decided to explore switching up the rectangular grid with a more organic look...
Radiolaria are multiplying
We're proceeding with designing and 3d-printing one new radiolarian model a day. These will be the first physical reward for the Neuron tier subscribers. We just completed our first week of production so we've made 7 unique radiolaria. It takes 12-14 hours to print each one our Form 3 3D-printer! We currently have 33 subscribers in the neuron, nucleus and galaxy brain tiers combined, so we need to make a lot more radiolaria. Each model is around 4.5" tall. If you have preferences on what style of radiolarian you would like to recei...
Creating Radiolaria
Welcome to our first subscriber-only Patreon post, where we’re going to talk about behind the scenes, works in progress and technical details. This post is about a project we’ve started this summer to create radiolarian-like sculptures.SEM microscopy images of radiolaria by Annick BaudrimontIf you don’t know, radiolarians are microscopic organisms that build intricate, geometric skeletons out of silica, essentially glass! They have inspired a lot of artists (including ourselves) mostly through drawings made by Ernst Haeckel. He was a 19th...
We're starting a Patreon!
We’ve decided to start a Nervous System Patreon, where you can get a subscription to… well us! It seems long overdue to have some way for people to support our work besides buying products. So what are we doing? We’ll post regular updates for subscribers about what we’ve been working on and what we’re interested in. We’ll also have a subscriber discord where people can ask us questions and discuss topics related to digital fabrication, running a small business, geometry processing, and simulating natural systems. We currently have 4...
