Reversing my usual practice, in this project the glass serves only to support the adhesive. I made each drop by dipping a hat pin in to a small container of uv adhesive, then moved the pin into position above the glass and allowed the drop to fall. The adhesive was viscous to begin with, but over time it auto-catalyzed, thickening it even further, so I had plenty of time to aim before a drop would fall. Once the fallen drop had settled into a hemispherical shape, I cured it in place with a uv gun. I could more-or-less control the size of the drop by how deeply I dipped the hat pin.

Untitled is presently mounted in a window, so it changes with the light throughout the day. To see a (quicktime) time-lapse movie of one morning's light, click here. It's a thirteen-second clip of snapshots taken at 30-second intervals for about 200 minutes, starting at around 5:30am.

This project was partly inspired by the trompe l'oeil work of Kim Tschang-Yeul. I wondered whether untitled would still fool the eye, even though the drops are actually in 3D.

The pattern of the drops on the glass (image below) was generated by a program I wrote that naively simulates the behavior of raindrops on a window (naively means not using real physics). Click here to see a version of the simulation in action--you'll need the Flash 8 (or later) plugin installed in your browser. There is also a screensaver implementation, built as a teaser for a project conceived by Jim Campbell. The project stalled, but Jim has consented to make the screensaver available as a free download.