Personal life and education
Shannon was born inCareer
Shannon's work incorporates scientific themes. Shannon built ''Squat'', an interactive robotic sculpture at his father's battery manufacturing plant in the summer of 1966. ''Squat'' won the Pauline Palmer Prize at theSculpture
Shannon's work is idea driven. His subject matter is that of existential conditions, i.e., the forces, properties, characteristics, proportions, the web of sensations and knowledge of which we are a part. For example, ''Ray'' (1986) is a sculpture of the spheres of the Sun and Earth in proportion, and the cone of energy, gravity, electromagnetic, luminous, that connects the two. Shannon makes magnetically levitated sculpture. The sculptures are suspended using permanent magnets. His series of suspended arrays includes room-filling three-dimensional crystalline arrangements of magnetic spheres each of which orient to Earth's magnetic field like a compass. His recent work includes large outdoor sculptures which behave as weightless objects. The sculpture's internal mechanisms consisted of axles, ball-bearings, universal joints, ball & sockets, fulcrums and massive counterweights, give them the ability to spin, tilt, rise/fall and glide horizontally and eventually return to equilibrium. Shannon designed the TED Prize, the Buckminster Fuller prize and the Trophee Jules Verne installed at the Musee de la Marine in Paris. In November 2019, the Science Museum Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, OK opened a year-long exhibition of new and older work by Shannon entitled "Tom Shannon: Universe in the Mind , Mind in the Universe". In the spring of 2020, 30-foot sculpture of Platonic solids will be installed at the entrance of the museum.Paintings
Throughout his career Shannon has used several techniques for making paintings. At first he used traditional brush and ink (or watercolor or oil) to create paintings the subjects of which were typically projects he was working on or projects in a setting, such as a sculpture in a landscape. Shannon then developed "Evaporations," a technique where aqueous paint was poured on a sheet of paper, and over time – a few days or weeks – the water would evaporate, leaving the pigment in dry "lakes" of color. An important concept in this painting technique is that the pigment is held "in suspension", a color particle, as it were, "floating" in a fluid. For Shannon, this was microscopic levitation, with a visual record of the pigment's "descent" onto a paper "ground". It was also for him a way to co-author a painting with nature, a lesson learned from John Cage. Another co-authoring with nature is Shannon's ''Trajectory'' series, where he tossed rubber balls wet with paint on inclined canvases, capturing the natural parabolic curve of the ball's path in gravity. The ''Paint Pendulum'' paintings are made using a radio-controlled six color pendulum paint dispenser of the artist's invention. The pendulum paint dispenser, controlled by the artist, released paint in discrete drops, like a very large inkjet printer, or smooth flowing streams of color. Recently in mid-2015, Shannon experimented with another painting format, which he calls Aerial Painting, where viewers can look at two-dimensional pattern on a canvas, which optically becomes a three-dimensional image, this without red and green glasses or other mechanical aids. "Looking 'through' a painting is something you do naturally," said Shannon. "It's the same as gazing at a distant horizon. Your brain re-orders space on the canvas, creating a natural 3D space, where objects hover in front and behind the canvas." An example of this technique is the painting "Mind Expansion." For Shannon this is another form of levitation, one of the recurring themes of his work.Patents
Shannon holds patents for the following: * first tactile telephone – US Pat. 3780225 – Filed January 3, 1972 * a color television projector (w/ Walter De Maria, Maris Ambats) – US Pat. 3800085 – Filed October 20, 1972 * a synchronous world clock US Pat. 4579460 – Filed May 17, 1984 featuring a Fuller-Sadao map face, which is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution * a double-reversible garments (w/ Caty Shannon) * a Video Airship (Air Genie) 3US Pat. 7173649 – Filed May 29, 2002 * patents pending for Graphene Floating Spheres and Magnetic Linking SystemAir Genie Video Airship
The Video Airship is an ongoing project which weaves together several themes in Shannon's work. In the late 60's Shannon proposed spherical televisions linked to orbiting camera satellites. Buckminster Fuller had earlier proposed a 200-ft sphere covered with lights to display Earth to the United Nations. Shannon designed a LED-covered spherical blimp with cameras that could land at school campuses and other public locations to deliver education and at night host rave dances. Aerovironment, Inc., the engineering firm founded by aeronautics legend Paul MacCready, found the design feasible; it can be aerodynamically controlled and can present clear computer video in daylight.References
External links
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Shannon, Tom 1947 births American artists 20th-century American inventors 21st-century American inventors Living people University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee alumni