Mona Lisa at Play: Part 7
The Paintball Assault on the Mona Lisa
As a fan of both the cable program Mythbusters and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, I am pleased to talk about both in this posting.
The paring of Mona and Mythbusters is at first blush an unlikely one. But as the most universally known work of art, it isn’t much of a stretch to think that if the Mythbusters duo were going to re-create a work of art, then the Mona would be their likely target. And as target, I’ve aptly described how they re-created her. Since paintball guns were the brushes Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman used to make their version of the Mona Lisa.
In August of 2008, the boys of Mythbusters were invited to the Nvidia’s NVISON conference in San Jose, CA. Mythbusters was enlisted by the conference organizers to provide the closing act. That last bit of sparkle and pow, everyone would go home and talk about.
Their closing act, as Adam describes it, was a “science lesson” on how a GPU processor out performs a CPU. And with all things Mythbuster, blowing stuff up and shooting things was involved. And on a good day…they’ll use robots.
This was a good day.
Taking six months to build two robots, Jamie and Adam fashioned a demonstration on Parallel Processing for the closing performance at NVISION. Not a subject I would find particularly scintillating, but as always the Mythbusters demonstrate you can have fun with just about anything.
Two robots were built. One robot to mimics the performance of a CPU. (A CPU works by performing a series of discrete actions, executed sequentially.) The other showcases the enhanced power of a GPU. (GPU’s can do immense parallel processing, producing high quality graphics for video games.)
The first robot, dubbed Leonardo, exhibited how a CPU processor works. And Leonardo functioned as designed when he methodically painted a Smiley-face using a single paint gun that was attached to its head.
It came off like a clever party trick. Amusing, but lacking wow.
Leonardo’s lackluster performance acknowledged, the Mythbuster boys set themselves a task to paint something more complex. Hence, their decision to re-create the most famous Smiley-face of them all… the Mona Lisa.
And of course, this was going to require a bigger bot. The Leonardo 2.0.
Leonardo 2.0 was built from a thousand pounds of aluminum and steel…a mile of high-pressure air hose… which required hundreds of pounds of compressed air… with 1,100 specifically addressed paint balls in 1,100 paint ball barrels.
When the trigger on the Leonardo 2.0 was hit…
… 2,100 gallons of air went through accumulators… then out a series of valves… into 1,100 paint gun barrels (all of exactly the same length)… at the bottom of which was a paint ball… which flew across 7 feet of space… and in 80 milliseconds… hit their target.
When it was all said and done… there was a new, freshly painted Mona Lisa and a new Guinness World Record. (Fastest painting of a Mona Lisa.)
Take a look at the video.
Be warned, it may take awhile to download. And once downloaded it’s a whopping 9:21 minutes long. Shorter versions of this performance can be found on YouTube. But the image quality on everything I looked at was grainy and unstable. This link is from the conference, and the production values are superior to anything else I’ve been able to find. Trust me, if you are going to watch the video, this is the video to watch.
Today’s paint ball post, marks the last entry on “Mona Lisa at Play”.
At least for now.
What’s next in the Mona exploration?
Not sure. Thinking about showing off Mona in the many off beat places she has appeared. But I don’t know. Might be fun to start talking about some of the serious artists who have used her image. Or some of the ads she has appeared in. Or I could talk about why she is the global icon she is. I just don’t know.
I’ll wait and see what my mood is when I sit down to write about her again. In the meantime, thanks for taking the time to read and explore with me, the Mona Lisa in all her iterations.
Posted by Judy Little
