How This Artist Makes Magnetic Fluid Sculptures

[Eric] I just remember it was so captivating,

really kinda alien like.

[Narrator] This strange looking material

is not computer generated.

What you're seeing is a liquid

with nano-sized particles of iron in it

reacting to a magnetic field.

It's called ferrofluid.

It was first developed by NASA

and artist Eric Mesple has been using it in his work

for the past 12 years.

[mesmerizing music]

Every single sculpture

I feel like I tackle with ferrofluid,

I have no idea how I'm gonna get this to work when I go in.

[playful music]

[Narrator] Eric is a master metal worker and builder.

He built this giant clock and a literal metal jacket.

My father, when I was 11 years old,

he got me an anvil and I started blacksmithing.

When I was younger I would make all sorts of stuff

from gates, ornamental spoons, and swords.

[Narrator] But ever since coming across ferrofluids

in a scientific article as a graduate student,

he's been captivated by it.

The more I read about it and the characteristics of it,

I just the whole time was thinking,

Oh, I really wanna do something with this stuff.

And when you were a kid

you could see the magnetic field in a 2D,

iron filings on a piece of paper,

you could see the striations of it,

but now you're actually seeing with nodes coming of off it

what the magnetic field looks like

in a three dimensional realm.

[Narrator] NASA developed ferrofluids in the early 1960s.

Engineer Steve Papell was trying to figure out how

to draw rocket fuel into the engine in zero gravity.

His solution, he would magnetize it.

Now the magnetic fuel was never actually adopted

for space flight,

but ferrofluids are used in a number

of different commercial applications.

From cooling loud speakers,

dampening vibrations on helicopters,

and even to create an airtight seal

around your computer's hard drive.

It's been used for many different things,

but what I use it for is none of those things.

I use it to show off how beautiful it looks.

[Narrator] What you're seeing

is Eric increasing the power to the electromagnet

until eventually the fluid jumps.

And it forms into those little cones

because that's the magnetic field,

but also that's least resistance too.

Once something gets skinnier and skinnier

and then it goes right up towards the magnet itself.

The very first time I got ferrofluid,

I had it shipped from a company called Ferro Tech,

and they're the ones that make ferrofluid.

I noticed instantly that it was totally, totally messy.

I mean, it's like black ink,

so I had ink all over myself,

but I would purchase natural magnets and move it around

and just stare at it and go like,

Wow, this is crazy.

But even the characteristics of me playing with it

with a magnet,

it was different than what I thought.

It wasn't quite moving how I wanted it to move

or I envisioned it moving,

but it was nonetheless still intriguing and beautiful to me.

I decided to do my first project,

which was the Machine Affecting Effect.

I made a very large sphere.

There was a huge natural magnet inside the sphere.

[Narrator] Teaching himself how to code,

Eric programmed the movement of the magnet

so it would seemingly become attracted

to a viewer who approached the sphere.

[Eric] I think there's something really important

about connecting people with a piece of work,

not only just visually,

but what you're doing is affecting it.

[Narrator] For his next project,

Eric built a wall of ferrofluid that would mirror the shape

of the viewer standing in front of it.

I was originally thinking of that pin toy

where you would like push your hand in

and all the pins would come out

and make the shape of your hand.

I really wanted to do a version of that

that was with just this fluid,

and as you would walk in front,

it would make a very 8-bit kind of representation of you

in real time.

I made 320 electromagnets

and I placed it behind this wall,

and I had a pump that would recirculate the fluid

up to the top and run over the surface of it.

I had to build all of the computer chips,

computer components, write the program.

I built every single magnet,

every single problem I ran in to,

I kinda had to figure out how to solve it.

[Narrator] Eric quickly ran into issues with the pumps

that circulated the ferrofluid.

These cheap pumps that you buy have a magnet

and they kinda spin around and that's what turns it.

All this fluid,

it's just dragging around on the pump system,

so it was adding tons of resistance and every half hour,

two hours, I was blowing them out.

I finally decided I'm just gonna tip the whole thing over

and make it in to a pool,

and so that was my third piece.

That one's called Ferroflection Pool.

I was in a class and it was an interactive musical class,

and there was a professor there who specialized

in what's called Max MSP,

and it's a way of programming for a lot of stuff

in the music industry and lighting and things timed.

An image is captured from an old Xbox,

the computer program tells this

microcontroller right here in the center,

and then this microcontroller tells these driver boards

which magnets to turn on or off,

and it just makes a real pixelated, simple representation

of what it's picking up through the camera.

The whole time in the class,

everyone else is working on their music projects,

I am trying to build a program for the sculpture I want.

Tons of wires, tons of connections,

tons of problems left and right

and eventually it got working.

[Narrator] As Eric built

on his experience with ferrofluids,

he had to learn more and more about magnetism

and how to build his own electromagnets.

In science class, your professor would take a nail

and then he would wrap the nail with copper wire,

and then he'd connect it to a battery,

and then you could pick up little paper clips or whatever.

That's what I was going for.

[Narrator] Using the same concept,

Eric built larger and more powerful electromagnets

to make the fluid jump further.

Well, when I first turned it on,

we weren't sure if it was working

so I kind of waved a crescent wrench over it,

and it immediately just sucked it out of my hand

and stuck right to the magnet.

[Narrator] As he built stronger magnets,

he faced new challenges.

Heat is a huge factor with magnets,

so if a magnet gets too hot, it gets saturated,

and meaning the magnetic field isn't really that optimal

for how much current you're really putting into it.

[Narrator] Eric developed a coolant system

for these larger, more powerful magnets.

So this is the next electromagnet.

This is the bottom part of the coolant system,

so this places in here,

and another version of this coolant system goes down here

on the steel.

So it's being cooled from both sides

as well as through the center.

[Narrator] In his 2016 piece, Killing Time,

Eric says he built his strongest electromagnet yet.

I'm guessing that that magnet, attached properly,

could probably pick up 1,000 pounds, maybe a small car.

[tranquil music]

And my father, he was very much of a builder,

as well as being an artist,

so I was helping out my father,

like physically built stuff when I was a very young kid.

He introduced me to the foundries.

Loveland, Colorado had some of the biggest foundries

in the the nation, surprisingly.

It started with mold making and wax chasing,

and then I moved up to pouring molten metal

and to welding and then eventually lead welder.

Most of the other lead welders were in their young 40s.

I just enjoyed creating.

I thought it was really awesome to just build things

with my hand and watch something unfold and be complete.

My dad's done tons of huge drawings.

I can still remember one drawing he had done,

this thing was massive.

I mean, it like nine feet by 14 feet,

and just the way he would draw,

I was really blown away with.

He'd do like a section over here,

and then he'd do a section over here,

and then a section over here,

and then the whole thing would completely come together

absolutely perfect,

and he didn't really outline the piece as a whole.

The whole thing would just fit together all of a sudden.

I was around this all the time.

I was around this sense of wonderment and awe

because my dad was doing things that no one else was doing.

I think, overall, the goal has been to create a sense of art

that kind of restimulates people about art.

A lot of sculptures I try to make,

I try to show the what ifs

or how is this possible to even do something like this.

Those are the fun questions for me to try to showcase

in this type of work, of the unforeseen things.

What most people don't realize is I have failed

so many times trying to figure this stuff out,

but as time goes on,

I figure more and more and more out,

and I don't know if a lot of people stick

with something that is that frustrating for a long time.

That's how it goes.

My current project, I'm using light,

and trying to bend the light with the magnet.

What's happening is as the magnet is spinning,

the microscopic particles of the iron,

they're actually moving in the pane of glass.

So when you see the light look like it's moving,

it's actually the way the iron particles are moving

and the light is refracting off of them.

Adding the light on this new system

is a whole new starting point

of frustration [laughs] for me.

[Narrator] Frustrations are just part of working

with this mesmerizing material.

[mesmerizing music]

It's so hard to even master anything in life.

With this fluid,

I feel like this is just the beginning.

And I've been into it for 10 to 12 years now [laughs],

so there's a lot left.

[mesmerizing music]