Pendulum with Artificial Hair, 2026
“But it wasn’t staying beneath the boat; Hooper knew the shark couldn’t remain stationary or rest. It was forced to keep moving in order to live.”
Mechanism: Dimitar Naydenov
“At first, the idea was simple — to make the pendulum move along a predetermined
trajectory.
We used a servo motor, setting the angles sequentially. Very quickly, it became clear
that the pendulum had other ideas — it would jump, stutter, and fail to move
smoothly. We realized that we were trying to impose movement on a system that
had its own dynamics. The next step was to understand that dynamics and work
with it rather than against it. A different motor, a different method of control — we
allow the pendulum to follow its natural movement, adding only a small amount of
force to compensate for the loss of energy.”
Pendulum enclosure: Ivaylo Stoimenov
With the support of