It represents a stable structure of levitating rings supported by a single guitar string, that gives this art piece a mystical air inspired by sounds waves, antigravitational forces, and nature.

I went through different stages. When I was a kid, I remember myself watching Sci-Fi films, and images of UFOs levitating and abducing people with a sort of antigravitational ray came to my mind. 

In this render, I had fun playing with the memory I have of E.T. and Elliot biking through the sky, and the unstoppable will of E.T. to contact with his family. 

The key was an instrument that I play in daily basis. A guitar is, in itself, a tensegrity system. Despite both head and bridge are connected by string tensional forces, the instrument is fully stable, as these latter are compensated by the truss rod inside the neck. When you pull from a string, it vibrates, produces the sound waves, and oscillates with a certain frequency until it goes back to the starting point. 

So, basically, I sort of "deconstructed" a guitar, with wood and metal as the core elements of this setting. I considered mahogany and stainless steel for this project, with .042 electric-guitar string as a link. The tensioning mechanism in a guitar is the machine head, and so I wanted it to be visible and accessible to play with tension - and to replace the string if overloaded!

During this project I faced 3 main challenges:

1 - creating a delicate yet strong structure supporting strain with minimal amount of  material

2 - hiding contact points while allowing DIY assembly

3 - feasible manufacturing

The geometry of a torus can be as beneficial from a structural point of view as troublesome for assembly. However, the beauty of the challenge was getting out from conventional solutions. So, I spent long hours trying to come out with ideas that could comply with the 3 points above.

Again, the solution was in a guitar. The system contains its own "truss rod", a locking system inspired by Floyd Rose nuts and a machine-head. 

This project gives shape to a personal vision I have. I had freedom to choose sizes, materials, finishing, etc. For this stage, I reused materials to minimise waste, in particular pine wood and AISI 304 steel. Both the rings and the inner structures where handmade in my workshop, as a proof of manufacturability. 

In this case I used Fusion 360 to better figure out geometries, sizes, and proportions. Also, I got the STL files for rendering with Blender. However, as I considered it more a piece of art than a project itself, I gave priority to experimenting in the workshop, testing different materials, feeling the results and playing around with a variety of settings, trying to find the easier way to build it.