Tatjana Van Vark

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Go to this site and you’ll be greeted by a crazy looking woman wielding a giant egg and a blunt object that looks like Jupiter with mischief in her eyes. This is Tatjana van Vark.  Her library of projects ranges from the mundane such as a couple of incandescent lamps, to a fully functional Antikythera mechanism. As you browse around at things like her one of a kind cipher based on the enigma machine and her inertial navigator platform shown above, you’ll find the quality of her work astounding. Randomly peppered haikus give us a brief glimpse into her mind as we look at, literally decades, of amazing work. We’re sure many of you are drooling at the thought of some build details, but you’ll have to work for it. Decipher the haiku on the coding machine’s page for the build details… if you can.

[thanks Verimius]

49 thoughts on “Tatjana Van Vark

  1. @george

    al gore’s documentary was probably more helpful to the world than this woman will ever be (regardless of how cool her projects are); i’d say the nobel is justified.

  2. I’m to agree with Devin here. As cool and insightful as these photos may be, what will her legacy and contribution stack to that of others?

    An artist is not remembered for their art but what their art inspired.

  3. all i’ll say is holy shit (in the good sense) and note that she must have spent a fortune on brass over the years.

    and so long as she enjoys what she does, who cares what her legacy is. i personally am inspired by the machine shop skills alone.

    and it does say this is only a portion of what she does. who knows what the rest is like..

  4. i want that haiku solved!

    here it is:

    ETSFV FD1NV ZS7M2
    UM8VK RCSZA P11IN FW-KX P/1RW
    1MF4L F+3,0 QHWKS H+53- ZMTBI

    QRVI8 YKK8Y

    somthing i notaced: the hover-over or title to the image is ‘1MF4L’ also the first “word” on the third line.
    the number of syllables should help

    this is not my specialty, but someone… please?

    1. I believe I have soled part of her haiku, not yours. The first line on the left is ENIGMA CODE, the last line on the right is her full name TATJANA J VAN VARK, the J is for Joelle

  5. Not to spoil the mood, but I’m skeptical towards ‘art’. Why obscure things like this? i.e. “Just look, maintaining internal silence, until the meaning of my work becomes clear.”. I’d look so much more favorably on her work without the meaningless* and mystical bullshit. If you have something to say, say it clearly; That’s what philosophy is for. If you want to ‘add value’ to something, business, marketing and ‘art’ are equivalent.

    *or possibly the opposite; too many possible meanings.

  6. It’s not like she made the Litton LN3 INS, all she’s done is restore it, and put it in an acrylic cylinder.. Nice effort, but not Godlike.

    Looking through her site, I’m not even sure she has a machine shop?

    Just another wanky artist I suspect. Making ‘art’ out of old aircraft parts.

  7. yall be’in hate’n cuz you nose you will never be as awesome

    but no, i can see you you guys are saying. this is not “godlike” but some of it is impressive. there are certainly aspects which i admire and may incorporate/implement into my own projects

  8. Oh and check the oscilloscope section. The page is titled “Oscilloscope – 1958” and underneath it says “Note from the editor : TvV was born in 1944”

    Holy shit, she built a scope at 14???

  9. @ Tachikoma, yes, she did build a scope at 14 – from scratch too, rather than a kit.

    I know I’m gonna come out sounding like my dad, but many hackers today have it pretty damn easy compared to hackers a few years back… now you can buy an arduino for less than a packet of smokes, but only a couple of generations back it might take a teenager weeks or months to save for the components to build stuff – and if the ‘magic smoke’ escaped it was a real big deal if you couldn’t see why… you couldn’t just keep throwing components at it until you eventually changed the one that fixed it the way we do now.

    Because parts were so dear, teens back then tended to study to a much greater depth before a build because it was a damn sight cheaper that way, they’d break less stuff – and I’d suggest that made them better hackers than us … because they often had a much deeper understanding of how their circuits worked.

    *hides behind something solid for the inevitable backlash*

  10. Yeah, teenagers 50 years ago worked hard to build a radio … Now, with the same amount of work they can build a webserver. I don’t think it’s a bad think that things become easier. It allows you to focus your mind on more high level stuff. I think that’s what we call “progress”.

  11. Yes, al gore’s documentary was *very* useful.

    prior to the movie, I suspected gore as being a slimy, self-serving, hypocritical, profiteering douchebag. after the documentary, I became *certain* of this.

    By the way, read the news. much of the “data” on which his man-bear-pig movie was based has subsequently been debunked.

    As for the nobel prize, I used to think that was something pretty special. Since they started doling them out to the likes of jimmy carter and al gore, a nobel medal now means about as much to me as a concert tee shirt… cool, but meaningless.

    >?@george said:
    >
    >al gore’s documentary was probably more helpful >to the world than this woman will ever be >(regardless of how cool her projects are); i’d >say the nobel is justified.

  12. “The quality of her craftsmanship is incredible. I wish there was more info with those pictures.”

    Posted at 8:54 pm on Aug 13th, 2009 by Tachikoma

    I think that is the point, to fire your imagination and get you to ask questions and answer them yourself.

    Brilliant. Cracked, but brilliant.

  13. does anyone know if she is still alive? See, I’m austin van vark, and I am kind of interested in finding out if I’m somehow related to her (seeing that there can’t be THAT many Van Varks :D)

  14. ClutchDude said: “An artist is not remembered for their art but what their art inspired.”
    That is and has been the tragedy of many artists throughout the times: Their art only inspired people, after they were long gone. It will probably be the same with Tatjana van Vark. Her works will inspire people in the future to re-discover mechanical engineering and craftsmanship. This means, it will happen in a future, where all these things have been lost, because they are not known to “common people” any more. Think of giant 100% robotic plants driven by artificial intelligence that does all the engineering as well as the construction work. Nobody takes things apart any more, because it’s easier to find out how they work by looking at their software (and because they can’t be taken apart without destroying them – we’re almost there already). This will be the time when the art of someone like Tatjana van Vark is going to inspire people, to go a different way (re-integrating knowledge and genius of the past into the then-present day and future).

  15. I believe I have solved part of her haiku by intuitive means, aka use of “cribs”.
    I am assuming she is writing in English.
    The first line at top left is the name of the poem of course: ENIGMA CODE (in Dutch it might be CODA).
    The last line, at the bottom right, is her full name: TATJANA J VAN VARK, the J is for Joelle.
    I came to this by counting up the number of characters(on the first and last lines), and I presume she was not using any nulls.

    This info is a mere starting point! Working out the rest of the encrypted poem will be immensely difficult for this polyalphabetic substitution cipher.

        1. gerisoft_-126481 on Dir.bg is nickname of my known guy -he on 17 years old have to learn Einstein theori with all Lorenz transformaions I like the genial persons as Tatjana and Gery

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