AZEk18

Kinetic Sculptures

Today I saw a great video about the sculptor Reuben Margolin, he creates Kinetic Sculptures using wood, cardboard and by just watching nature, understanding it and replicating it mechanically. His stuff is just impressive to see and even more impressive is to see him go through his process.  The best, or worse part of what he does is that he never knows what he’s going to get, what the output is going to be, until he completely builds one of these sculptures, imagine how freaked any client of ours would be if this was the case in a visual designers world.

Seeing this video reminded me of another incredible kinetic sculptor, in this case we go off to Holland to take a look at how Theo Jansen, uses the wind to power his unique, creature-like creations. They are actually a bit distressing to look at first, but it’s great to see and engineer creating art, or the other way around, it doesn’t matter to him, as it shouldn’t to any developer out there.

It’s an incredible coincidence that when I was thinking of writing this post I wanted to link the previous artists with the following video. Theo Jansen’s video show previously actually made the link by itself being a BMW commercial. The last kinetic sculpture I wanted to place in this post is actually one motored by Arduino (I believe), an incredible piece featured in the BMW Museum that creates something only acheived by programing, programing a lot actually.

All this just comes to show us that engineering and art has this bridge that is only in our minds as Jansen said in the BMW add and designers like John Maeda have said all along. Rationality is just another form of human expression and it creates magnificent results.