Sharing one of my old interactive kinetic art experimental projects from Nov-2020: A breathing structure. One day, I was walking in FabLab Bahrain and saw a foldable structure used for advertising banners. I started playing with it, opening and closing it, and when I got home, I thought about bringing this seemingly lifeless foldable structure to life.

So, I analyzed the mechanical movements and decided to build and test a linear mechanism using a stepper motor. I faced two challenges: one was that I had to code and wire a stepper motor, which was something I didn't know how to do back then. The second challenge was that I didn't have a linear screw mechanism to use, so to test the concept quickly, I used a normal thread. For this to be a fully entertaining experience, as a next future step, I plan to hang this structure from a ceiling and add a motion sensor. This way, when people move around it, they can interact with the breathing structure. Moreover, I can experiment with covering the structure with flexible cloth to hide the functional parts and give it a nice aesthetic look.