When Alex Silva, an art and design sophomore, dropped into one of the pools at the skate park in Venice Beach, Calif. last month, he stuck out like a sore thumb,, and not because he fell, but because he was riding something that was weird, even by Venice’s standards.
Silva spent about 25 hours working on his “Skate Wheel,” a wheel made out of nine complete skateboards. The skateboards are attached at the ends with bolts to make a human hamster wheel. Silva stands up on the skateboard touching the ground while holding on to the one at the top of the wheel. When he comes up to an obstacle like a curb, he steps forward, onto the next skateboard and the wheel rotates, allowing him to roll over the obstacle.
It is currently on display as a part of the Robert E. Kennedy Library’s ongoing exhibition along with several other projects created by students and local artists. The exhibit, called reKinetic, will be on display until June 6 and includes group and individual projects ranging from Silva’s Skate Wheel to an outdoor mobile to the Wind Wall, a project created by four architecture juniors.
Like Silva’s Skate Wheel, the pieces of art on display in the library are fully functional. The artwork, designed by Cal Poly students from the College of Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED), art and design students, student clubs and local artists, was designed to be aesthetically pleasing as well as to interact kinetically with its environment.
Catherine Trujillo, who works in the library’s special collections department, oversees the exhibits at Gallery at the Commons, including reKinetic.
“They completely came up with their own visions,” Trujillo said. “The only thing I did was make adjustments for safety and size.”
Each quarter that the library puts on Gallery at the Commons, the library partners with another organization in order to provide funding for the students’ projects. This quarter, the library teamed up with CAED to create reKinetic.
“We are able to do a lot with a little, students had about $100 dollars,” Trujillo said. “We have other collaborators, too. For the Mars exhibit, we partnered with the College of Science and Mathematics and borrowed models from NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”
Besides being able to interact with the artwork, the projects are all eco-friendly. They are either made up of reclaimed materials or act as a model for how someone could recycle those materials, like Silva’s Skate Wheel.
The Wind Wall stands about 7 feet high and 12 feet wide and isn’t made of plaster, concrete, or cardboard. Across the top beam hang 19 wires with cut-up paper cups and reclaimed materials. As people walk by the wall or as a breeze blows, the cups spin like windmills. Of course, the inside of the library doesn’t get much of a breeze, so the students rigged up fans to blow the wall to demonstrate its function to students observing the exhibit.
“Even though it isn’t solid it still serves the purpose of being a wall or divider,” said Anthony Fossi, one of the student designers of the wall. “If you go through it you’re going to break something.”
The purpose of the wall, like the other projects is to connect the user to the library and to create something aesthetically pleasing, Fossi said.
Other projects include “skINHALE,” three black strips of fabric that breathe like lungs as people walk by, “The Expressionists,” “We’ve Lost Our Marbles,” a structure of tubes and ramps for marbles to travel down, and various mobiles and sculptures by local artists. All of the projects use reclaimed materials or objects and materials used other than for their initial purpose, from old paint cans, to paper cups, to Silva’s skateboards.
Most of the exhibit’s contributers found their own inspiration for their projects based on the reKinetic’s parameters of using reclaimed items to create something functional and aesthetic and proposed them to Trujillo. Silva created his Skate Wheel without even knowing about reKinetic and was approached by Trujillo who asked him to be a part of the exhibition.
The idea to connect more than one skateboard at the ends came from something Silva saw being sold in a store, he said. The skateboard was similar to his Skate Wheel in how the boards were attached, but it was made out of only three skateboards, not nine.
Silva asked himself, if someone can build a skateboard with more than one deck, why stop at three, he said. He began playing with the idea of creating an entire wheel out of skateboards using Tech Decks. Tech Decks are scaled down skateboards people “skate” with their fingers. He was able to figure out how many skateboards he would need to buy and if his idea was even possible using his finger-board model.
“It got me thinking, why can’t we do that with more?” Silva said. “We tried it out with Tech Decks at first, and it turned out it took nine decks to make a wheel.”
Each of the nine decks were designed by Silva’s friends. Those friends decorated the boards with paint and pens, putting a personal touch to each of them. The one Silva created is focused around marijuana’s effects on the brain. Silva created it with the intention of being able to handle rougher terrain than a normal skateboard would, he said.
When you get to an obstacle that would normally stop someone on a skateboard, like a curb, the rider can simply walk the Skate Wheel up the curb. It’s basically a piece of art that can be played with, Silva said.
“I’m glad it’s finished,” Silva said. “The last few weeks I was working on this, I barely slept. I didn’t think about anything else.”
Last quarter, students and faculty from the College of Architecture and Environmental Design proposed the idea for reKinetic to the library. Students in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, student clubs and community members began working on their projects near the end of last quarter. Now the projects are on display in the library’s 880 square foot gallery, where many students spend time sipping coffee and working on their laptops.
reKinetic’s parent project, Gallery at the Commons, has had a total of nine projects, including one traveling exhibition since its creation in 2006.
“The range of projects is limited only to the imaginations of the students and faculty that propose the projects to the library,” Trujillo said.