Awesome Ferrofluid

The way that Venom comes to life from a pile of black ooze is awesomely creepy. JLaservideo wanted to replicate the effect in real life and figured out the best way to do it was to create a suit from 100,000 neodymium magnets and latex, then let ferrofluid do the rest of the work.

Ferrofluid is a special kind of liquid that’s attracted to magnetic poles. DAKD Jung shows off an awesome custom-built speaker that takes advantage of this property to propel and direct ferrofluid to the beat of the music. A second video shows off how it works. It’s basically the Lava Lamp 2.0… and we want one.

Designers Graham Plumb and Stephen Braitsch collaborated on this amazing mechanical display that uses a series of 180 magnets to write text in a pool of ferrofluid. They built 10 custom machines which are programmed to raise and lower magnets, creating the segmented letters in the oily fluid.

Bob Products makes these large-scale professional displays which use electromagnets to play with the strange and unusual properties of ferrofluid. The systems can be programmed to manipulate the magnets and fluid while displaying lighting and sound effects.

We’re not sure what sort of magnets Chemical Bouillon used beneath their container of ferrofluid, but they used them to manipulate the wondrous magnetic fluid into some fascinating organic patterns. More here and here.

Damjan Stankovic and Marko Pavlovic’s Rhei works a lot like the Ferrolic Clock, except it uses mechanically operated magnets instead of electromagnets to control the ferrofluid. Its animation is a lot simpler, but none of the shapes produced are exactly alike.

Zelf Koelman’s Ferrolic Clock uses ferrofluid suspended in clear liquid and electromagnets to steer the fluid into place to display the current time as well as abstract patterns. Zelf will produce a limited run, for a whopping $8500 ea.