breaking progress

I have been working on my shapes of earth, venus and mars. I havent ordered the gears yet simply because everytime i try to, I never know what i am supposed to order. So I emailed Harry Avakian, an Assistant professor of engineering at wentworth, and i asked him to possibly help me figure out what i need to specifically identify my parts to order them. I thought about making my own gears, but conceptually, the gears would seem more like a piece of my art to me than indifferent machinery, which is more what I am going for with my statement. I also read a very interesting article about the controversy over the mathematic fractal analysis of Jackson Pollack's work. Fractals basically identify through mathematics the system one uses in their methods of mark making, specifically pattern making. This is exactly my goal for this semester, one which i have tried to go about in the only ways i currently know how. But there is a physicist who teaches at Boston College, who I have also emailed, who is working on Pollack's fractal analysis. I have asked him to possibly meet with me to discuss how he goes about this analysis. So that I might try to do it for myself, or at least get to a new plateau of my research. The article was in Art News Feb. 2007, called "Fracas over Fractals."