This sculpture is intended to be spun while iluminated by a strobe light flashing at just the right frequency.
It will then show bubbles going up and down, avoiding each other and bouncing off the moving paddles at the top and bottom. On top there is a crenellation that very slowly moves sideways, so that it virtually stands still.
The video below shows a computer simulation of what it will look like.
Perhaps you can manage to put a strobe light into the cylinder. That would make for interesting illumination!
The trick is that the angle through which the sculpture rotates between frames is the
Golden angle. This is an idea by
John Edmark: He took a sequence of shape elements, each rotated with respect to the previous one through the Golden angle about a common axis and also moving in the radial/axial plane, while possibly changing form. So after a rotation through the Golden angle, each element is replaced by its successor in the sequence, yielding an animation. This specific angle has the property of producing evenly spaced arrangements of elements because it is based on φ, the most irrational number.
This design features three new tricks for φ-based zoetropes, in addition to the basic idea by John Edmark and my additions presented with
these 2
products:
1. The elements are negative spaces.
2. The elements are not only depending on a parameter, being calculated independently of each other and possibly clashing together, but they acutally interact. In this case, they avoid each other.
3. Sideways drifting elements are synchronized even though they have different cycle length. The holes always hit the paddles, even though there are fib(12)=144 holes and fib(6)=8 and fib(7)=13 paddles on top and bottom, respectively, and the sideways drift speed is different too, but exactly by the right amount to make the synchronization work.
Help for building the electromechanical equipment required to animate the sculpture:
https://siquod.org/en/bloom
http://www.instructables.com/id/Blooming-Zoetrope-Sculptures/