The Skrillex Mirror uses a rear-mounted speaker to vibrate the mirror’s surface in time with movements in music. With the music turned off it functions as a standard mirror, but with music playing the reflection becomes dynamic. The Skrillex Mirror plays the dubstep artist’s Top 5 Bass Drops (as determined by Castor) to have the greatest impact on the surface vibration.
Castor Design used the Aluminum Group Show as an opportunity to further explore an area of interest through the Royal Castor Telescopy Club, a division of its Sciences and Humanities Division.
For the show, Castor has produced a fully functioning Newtonian reflecting telescope. Named after its inventor, this type of telescope has a concave “primary mirror” at its lower end (8” 1200mm f/6 mirror), and a diagonal “secondary mirror” at the end of the eyepiece. The telescope uses a Dobsonian pivoting base to locate its focus, and sits atop a rotating platform.
On March 21st 2019 Castor Design and East Room’s New Auction held an exhibition called “Simple Truths” collecting recent work by Castor Design’s Science and Humanities Division. The pieces in the show are all motivated by scientific concepts. The opening was preceded by a dinner and followed by a live set by “Mothership,” a Led Zeppelin cover band.
Projects included:
A “gravity battery” is a type of machine that creates and stores energy through raising a mass and allowing it to fall. This type of machine explores the Laws of Thermodynamics, the first of which describes how energy is not created or destroyed, but is transferred from one form into another form. Here, gravitational potential energy is transferred into kinetic energy, which is then transformed into light.
Ug= mgh illustrates these principles through the controlled fall of a 200 lb cube of marble, which is used to power LED lights on a table lamp. The marble block is suspended from a pulley 10’ high. Once the marble begins its descent, it will drive a custom-machined aluminum gear set, which turns a small dynamo motor that powers the table lamp. For every rotation of the first gear, the motor turns 146 times.
The title Ug= mgh describes the formula at work. The Ug in the equation refers to gravitational potential energy. When being lifted, the marble cube is gaining gravitational potential energy, since work is required to elevate the object against gravity. At its peak, the object possesses its maximum gravitational potential energy. Then mgh is the relationship between the object’s mass, its acceleration due to gravity, and the height it falls from. The gravitational potential energy is converted into kinetic energy as the mass is raised and then through its fall.
It takes the marble block roughly 10 to 14 minutes to fall completely, depending on the motor’s distance from the final gear. At which point, the weight will need to be cranked back up to the top again. Mechanical advantage of the crank allows the user to easily reset the machine.
Castor Design’s Brian Richer has updated his Captive series for 2018. In addition to the pieces displayed in the previous captive collection, some new pieces were shown at an exhibition at Mjolk this May. These include a captive Donald Judd chair, a captive planter and a captive vase. A captive cube in alabaster and a captive bowl electroplated in copper during the CU Exhibition were also on display.
An electric Cloud Chamber that shows the trails of electrons and other subatomic particles through a vapour cooled down to -40°C. A cloud
chamber is a particle detector used for visualizing the passage of ionizing radiation. A charged particle interacts with the vapour by knocking electrons off gas molecules during collisions, resulting in a trail of ionized gas particles. Using a Van de Graaff generator in the vicinity of the cloud chamber will result in shockwave-like patterns through the vapour. The ability to view these trails reveals some truth about the universe.
Castor is debuting its Middle Grey series at ICFF New York 2018. In photography, painting, and printing, Middle Grey is the name given to the shade of grey that appears to the human eye to be halfway between black and white. It’s used to determine how light will affect a given film stock (i.e. whether it will result in under or over-exposure). The specific Middle Grey shade is generally defined as reflecting 18% of visible light. Castor’s Middle Grey line uses this shade as the basis for its finish colour.
The series is limited to one process to make each form, carried out through a family of products. The Floor Lamp, Wall Sconce, Desk Lamp, and the Pendant are all made from extruded aluminum tube that is laser-cut and painted. Each light uses an LED light source through an acrylic diffuser.
The Floor Lamp and Desk Lamp are both weighted with grey marble.
The Desk Lamp and Sconce use “elevator style” push-button switches, while the Floor Lamp uses a rotary knob to activate the light.
The Pendant lights are capped with polyurethane and can be powered from either end through an input jack. The pendant lights are linkable when connected with a male-to-male connector.
M74207281 is the largest known prime number. Represented in scientific notation, the number is 2^74207281-1. Written out, the number is “two to the power of seventy-four million, two hundred seven thousand, two hundred eighty-one, minus one.” Found in January 2016 by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, it is 22.3 million digits long.
The Two to the power of Seventy Four Million Two Hundred and Seven Thousand Two Hundred Eighty One minus One books are part of Castor Design’s continued exploration of scientific and mathematical principles; presenting universal truths in a simple, elegant way. Past projects with Castor’s Science and Humanities division have included an electron accelerator, a particle cloud chamber, and lighting projects using the wireless transfer of electricity. Brian Richer of Castor Design conceived of the books, which were designed with Alex Durlak of Perish Publishing. The books are part of a series that also includes a 50’ long poster at 2 pt font, t-shirts with the book’s title, and an Instagram feed @M74207281Prime posting 4900 digits of the number each day, complete in 2030.
A prime number is a natural number that has no positive divisor other than 1 and its itself, e.g. 2, 3, 5, 7, etc. They play an important role in pure mathematics and its applications. Though we have spent centuries working with prime numbers, their true nature and distribution remain a mystery. Based on Euclid’s postulate using the sequence of known prime numbers as building blocks for the larger primes that follow, we know that there are an infinite number of primes. However, they strangely occur less frequently as they get larger. German mathematician Bernhard Riemann observed that the frequency of prime numbers is very closely related to the behaviour of an elaborate function called the Riemann Zeta function: The Riemann hypothesis asserts that all solutions of the equation lie on a certain vertical straight line. A proof that would explain the distribution of prime numbers is one of the last great unsolved mathematics puzzles.
Each of the volumes of 2^74207281-1 is over 1300 pages long for a combined total of 3982 pages of the number’s digits. Despite the apparent randomness of prime numbers, the digits have significance whether we recognize the numbers as prime or not. G.H. Hardy wrote, “317 is a prime number not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way or another but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.”
Like the books in Borges’ Library of Babel whose seemingly random letters and punctuation served as building blocks for the basis of language and the universe, the digits within 2^74207281-1 reveal the universe’s mathematical structure. Everything in the universe, including humanity, is part of this structure. All matter is made of particles which have properties of charge and spin; these properties are essentially mathematical. Notwithstanding their apparent simplicity and fundamental character, prime numbers remain one of the most mysterious objects studied by mathematicians. The impossible task of the series is to present the number in such a way that it may reveal some insight into the nature of prime numbers.
Book Details
274207281-1 is published by Perish Publishing, Toronto in 2017. It is printed in a limited edition of ten, two artist’s copies and one display copy. This book is designed by Alex Durlak of Perish Publishing and Brian Richer of Castor Design. It was edited and set into type at Standard Form, then printed by Copywell and bound by Anstey Bindery in Toronto. Each edition is held by a honed Carrara marble bookend with a black reflective face.
The book is 7” by 10.5”, a ratio that follows the classic harmonic 2 : 3 proportions. The margin proportions follow the common medieval structure of 2 : 3 : 4 : 6. The cases are wrapped in white book cloth and the binding features black edge colouring, black
headbands and black endpapers. The covers and spine are printed on a letterpress in black and the colophon is printed on a letterpress in metallic silver on the endpapers. The inside pages were printed on a web inkjet press in black on Bible paper.
The titling face is Bauer Bodoni by Heinrich Jost for the Bauer Foundry in 1926 and is based upon a serif cut by Giambattista Bodoni in 1798. The body face is Figgins Sans by Nick Shinn for Shinntype and is based upon a series of sans serifs cut by the V. & J. Figgins foundry in 1836. The paper is Ethos Uncoated Inkjet, made at the Appleton Coated mill in Combined Locks, Wisconsin.
In 1874, Torontonians Matthew Evans & Henry Woodward patented their design for the incandescent light bulb before selling the patent to Thomas Edison, who went on to produce and popularize their design. As part of a series of exhibitions commissioned by Cadillac for Canada 150, our Black Mirror installation at Union Station in Toronto is an opportunity for self-reflection, drawing inference from Canadian lighting innovation, and is our take on the power of light.
The Black Mirror is a tinted reflective dot in the centre of a recessed white area. Behind the mirror are twelve custom-built 100W LEDs arranged radially, spreading the light outward in each direction and softened by a sheet of scrim in between. These super bright LEDs have a combined output of 168,000 lumens. For comparison, daylight is 98,000 lumens. Staring into a black reflective surface with a glow behind it, the Black Mirror installation calls to mind our use of cell phones. Although the screen is ubiquitous today, black-tinted mirrors have long been used for their ability both reflect and abstract what’s before them. We’ve taken this idea and multiplied it in scale.
Landscape painters often used black mirrors as a tool to abstract the subject reflected in them by reducing a scene’s colour and tonal range. The occult technique of scrying works the same way. Scrying involves peering into an object for inward reflection, or to receive a message or prophecy. To scry, look deep into the mirror without picking a spot to focus on. Between the brightness of the light and the tint in the mirror, it eventually becomes hard to discern figures. You may notice a small, cloudy glow in the centre of the mirror.
Photos by Peter Andrew Lusztyk (@PeterAndrewLusztyk), Joshua Telfer (@JoshuaTelfer), and Ryan Tacay (@Phraction).
The Captive (or ‘unfinished’) figures of Michelangelo are the primary inspiration for the series by Brian Richer. Richer, the Creative Director at Castor Design is also a trained stone carver. He has worked on many architecturally significant buildings in North America, and has explored captives for years.
The Captive sculptures are simple Platonic forms, hand-carved with a mallet and chisel – no power tools were used in their carving. Unlike most sculptors—who built a model and then marked up their block of marble to know where to carve—Michelangelo always worked freehand. He saw the sculptor’s job was to reveal the work that already existed within the stone. In these figures one can still see the grooves from the chisel, the process of the work, revealing the hand of the sculptor.
The finished collection is one that presents simple classic forms: a stool, side table, and a bowl emerging from rough blocks of Indiana Limestone partially consumed by the natural material. The result is both recognizable and venerable at once.
The “Liberace x Flavin” installation is a music and light performance for Azure Magazine’s 2016 AZ Awards. Hundreds of fluorescent tubes between six and ten feet tall are set up around a grand piano, lit wirelessly through induction in the same vein as a Tesla coil. The light sculpture is sound-sensitive; its mass of fluorescent tubes activate based on a concert pianist’s performance. Each note adjusts the brightness of the sculpture’s bulbs.
Pianist: Amy Seulky Lee.
Photography: Peter Lusztyk.
Videography: Peter Lusztyk, Chris Clifford.
“Nature Abhors a Vacuum”
Despite our growing familiarity with particle accelerators like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, for most of us the idea of a particle accelerator is still abstract. Castor Design have produced their take on the particle accelerator in an effort to make the science behind the concept more approachable.
The Castor Design particle accelerator is based on research by physicist JJ Thomson at Cambridge in 1897. Thomson is credited with discovering the electron while passing a cathode ray between two electrodes in a glass vacuum tube. Castor’s particle accelerator operates in the same way.
With consideration given to the accelerator’s design, its hand-blown glass tube with machined electrodes is displayed on top of a black marble base with an overhanging shade. Its transformer and vacuum are presented alongside, housed in custom component boxes.
When electrical current is activated and a enough of a vacuum has been formed within the tube in order for electrons to travel without striking a molecule of gas, low-mass particles accelerate to 30% of the speed of light, which strike other atoms and give off light as they settle.
The arced plasma light quickly stabilizes and “flows” in a straight line across the centre of the tube. As gas molecules undergo more collisions, emission wavelengths appear separated out into plasma bands, demonstrating the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. More columns indicate that the electrons’ energy in a given state is less defined. When the vacuum dissipates, the plasma reaches its extinction point and scatters.
Materials: Carrera Marble, Oak
Hand-carved letters in marble.
Pi is Exactly 3
Historically there have been numerous attempts to square a circle, including an attempt in 1894 to pass legislation in the United States that would definitively and erroneously signify Pi as exactly 3.
Schrödinger’s Cat is Dead
Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. The scenario presents a cat which may be simultaneously both alive and dead, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.
Hail Double Knob Children of Mars
In an attempt to share his controversial findings with colleagues while shielding them from the authorities, Galileo developed a code of anagrams. This was sent to Kepler in confidence, unfortunately Kepler was unable to decode the message correctly and created this garbled text.
Castor Design have made a dining table and a pair of benches out of hard candy. Two inches thick, the treatment resembles a glass-top dining table. The set was made during the 2015 Toronto Design Offsite week for the Dinner by Design charity event hosted by GE Monogram and the Toronto Design Exchange, the proceeds going toward Toronto’s Casey House.
Responding to the theme of the event, at the intersection of dinner and design is an edible table. Following this line of logic, Castor Design made the table top out of hard candy, pouring a 150°C/300°F mixture of sugar, water, syrup, and colouring into a mould on top of an 8’ x 3’ powder-coated steel frame. The hard candy is meant to be used, so after pouring it is left to cool and solidify and then finished with a lacquer spray. Prior to its finishing the table would be edible, having a maple flavour.
The dining set was made at Parts & Labour’s catering kitchen where Castor Design’s principals Brian Richer and Kei Ng are part owners. The table was formed in three separate 60L pours, each with a slightly different shade of red, which results in a marbled texture in the candy. Lit from underneath, the table has molten look that is amplified by the back bench’s slow decline to the floor. Glass tableware is set up to catch the light coming through the table.
The table is installed at the Design Exchange from January 19-25th 2015.
For those interested in making a set at home, the recipe is as follows:
Table
120kg sugar
60kg water
30kg syrup
Food colouring as desired
Bench (x1)
40kg sugar
20kg water
10kg syrup
Food colouring as desired
The four geometric sculptures, hand carved out of limestone, are changed on a molecular level. This is due to the thermal decomposition of limestone (CaCO3) in a lime kiln. What appear as objects slowly decomposing is accomplished by heating the material to above 825 °C, a process called calcination. This process drives off the carbon dioxide (CO2); leaving quicklime. The quicklime (CaO) is not stable and, when cooled, will spontaneously react with CO2 from the air until, after enough time, it will be completely converted back to calcium carbonate unless slaked with water to set as lime plaster or lime mortar. This process is called the Lime Cycle. Further exploration of this series converting hand carved tracery window from St. Michael’s Cathedral into calcium oxide and making plaster combined with finely grounded marble dust mixed with water used as a medium to paint. By changing the forms completely from the original pieces of work into flat two dimensional wall pieces.
CAPTIVE MUNNY
Design Exchange (Toronto)
Materials: Carrera Marble
This was part of a show called This is Not a Toy co-curated by Pharrell Williams. A number of artist were given Munny Dolls and asked to do an intervention. The inspiration for this Munny was Michelangelos captives. The Munny was carved in Carrera marble, using hand tools and a pointing machine; a tool for duplicating models.
A closer examination of the sculpture reveals that the bulb is emitting light although the pins through which a fluorescent bulb normally receives current remain unconnected, and the tube appears to be unpowered. This effect is achieved through the wireless transmission of electricity. The marble base houses a circuit that safely stores an electric current within a magnetic field, which is then transferred into the fluorescent bulb. While being displayed, the bulb sits in a channel carved into the sculptures marble base. It will continue to emit light if lifted several inches away.
A closer examination of the sculpture reveals that the bulb is emitting light although the pins through which a fluorescent bulb normally receives current remain unconnected, and the tube appears to be unpowered. This effect is achieved through the wireless transmission of electricity. The marble base houses a circuit that safely stores an electric current within a magnetic field, which is then transferred into the fluorescent bulb. While being displayed, the bulb sits in a channel carved into the sculptures marble base. It will continue to emit light if lifted several inches away.
TIFF Bell Lightbox (Toronto)
Materials : Brass Chandeliers, copper sulphate, plaster
Each chandelier was wrapped in plaster gauze and submerged in copper sulphate until crystals formed. An accompanying video was also made showing the formation of crystals under a microscope.
Pope Joan is a legendary female Pope who supposedly reigned for a few years some time thought to be between 853–855 AD. The story first appeared in the writings of 13th-century chroniclers, and subsequently spread through Europe. To understand why there’s a hole in the seat of the chair, we recommend you read about Pope Joan here.