Kinetic Sculpture Takes A Page From Modern Life

The blurry image above is a snap of toy cars as they zoom around a multi-lane, multi-level, maniacal-maze called Metropolis II. We originally took a look at the video after the break (do it now!) but found more information on [Chris Burden’s] kenetic sculpture in this NYT article. He and eight studio artists began work on the project back in 2006. They built 1200 custom designed cars and gave them a huge city to traverse, with up to 18 lanes at times. The work is not yet done, and the video below is dated (having been filmed in 2009), but project is slated to conclude in about two months and the installation has already been snapped up by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

And here we thought this was the product of an out-of-work packaging system design engineer. Nope, it’s art, and it certainly eclipses other kinetic sculptures we’ve seen.

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A Bicycle Build For… 2.0

Here’s an interesting way to fill the second seat on your tandem bicycle. It seems no one ever wants to be the stoker, so this gentleman decided to build his riding partner. JouleS powers the bicycle from the back using the same motions a human would. It’s not the easiest way to make an electric bicycle but the mechanics that went into it are quite beautiful. See the old boy pedaling away after the beak.

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Perpetual Ball Roller

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te9X4VRj8dU]

This interesting little sculpture caught our eye. Called the Perpetual Ball Roller, it simply rolls a ball on a track. It has both manual and automatic modes with variations in the automatic mode to keep it amusing. This is very elegant, and would be fun to have sitting around to play with. The only problem is the noise. The servo that he is using is quite loud. What could he do to make it function silently?

[via Instructables]