2017: Spintronic by Nicole Beck add Shimmer & Sparkle to the Donovan Bridge, Batavia

Spintronic by Nicole Beck

Location: Dionovan Bridge

Installed: July 7, 2017.

Stainless Steel and Dichroic Glass / Dimension: 10′ x 3′ / Completed: 2015.

When the Donovan Street Bridge project was completed in 2007, the design included four piers, each with a location designated for four works of art corresponding to the categories: Nature, History, Science and Art.

Friday, July 7, 2017 was the installation of “Spintronic” by Nicole Beck, which represents Art.

It was the third sculpture installed on the bridge.

Two other sculptures, “Nature’s Sounds of Harmony” by Kai Schulte representing Nature, and.. “A Look Back” by Oscar Leon and Jessica LoPresti representing History, had already been installed.

One more sculpture,“Fractal Limits” by Bruce White representing Science, will soon be installed.

Spintronic – by Nicole Beck

Spintronic by Nicole Beck.
Stainless Steel and Dichroic Glass / 2015.
The plaque reads..

Self Expression is the basic human activity that embodies our individuality, and the energy behind it has led to man’s greatest achievements. Spintronic’s beauty is derived from dynamics that electrons can create when acting under the influence of electromagnetic forces. Yest the significance of the design may be in the enery and movement upward that reflects expansion, growth, and even joy. The colors created by shifts of lights through the unique glass are also symbolic of the vivesity and changes wityhin a community and its people.

Spintronic was chosen as the Art component to the sculptures to grace the William J. Donovan Bridge to acknowledge the importance of self expression in this case, the arts, to the community.

MORE about Spintronic

The basic concept is rooted in the electromagnetics of the cutting-edge technology of spintronics. Itis the study of the intrinsic spin of the electron and its associated magnetic moment. Spintronics emerged from discoveries in the 1980s concerning spin-dependent electron transport phenomena in solid-state devices. The round disks in Spintronic represent the spinning of electronic nuclei.

The sparkling colors of the round disks come from the use of Dichroic glass. It is a kind of glass which displays two different colors by undergoing a color change in changing lighting conditions. It is produced by stacking layers of glass and micro-layers of metals or oxides which give the glass shifting colors depending on the angle of view. The custom designed dichroic glass discs for Spintronic were manufactured from a leader in outdoor-grade sculpture and architectural glass out of Tallahassee, FL– Kaiser vonRoenn Studios. Their forte is fabricating glass for extreme environments. The original sculpture was taller, and had to be cut to meet the 10′ tall specification. The changes were made at the Vector Custom Fabricating.. where the stainless steel base was also added.

The inspiration for Spintronic came when Beck was working on another sculpture “Amplifiers,” which is installed at the ECE building at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was a $250,000 commission by the Capital Development Board of Illinois Art-In-Architecture program… click here..

Images from Installation of Spintronic by Nicole Beck

Spintronic – by Nicole Beck

Five minutes – No Edit – video of installation in progress. For a sculptor, this may seem nothing unusual. But for others, a crane lifting a large sculpture, from a flatbed trailer to a raised concrete pier on a bridge may be pretty intriguing! So here it is, an absolutely unedited coverage of the crane lifting the sculpture.

However, after the sculpture was placed on the concrete pier, it had to be put back on the ground. Why, you wonder? The sculpture was initially placed on the foundation, to determine the exact location to drill holes in the concrete foundation, where bolts will be inserted to secure the sculpture. In image below we see Bill McGrath drilling hole on the concrete foundation. After the holes were drilled, the sculpture was lifter again by the crane, and this time, properly bolted into the concrete foundation of the bridge. It now stands secure at the location. So the first time the sculpture was crane-lifted, I took a video, and the second time, some took some still images, that can be seen below.