RANDOM INTERNATIONAL came up with a really great artwork for the Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children in London. The idea is good. The red sphere makes sense.
But sadly the implementation ruins the work. The thing jerks around. A second grade science project with this kind of performance would get a ‘well meaning nod’ but hardly a good grade. I would not be surprised if the work makes odd noises and causes troubles when it runs day in day out. It likely will not run for a long time without interruptions. I wonder if the makers would have thought about the fact that you need to clean the sphere once a week, otherwise it will look rather dusty.
Having to look at the un smooth motion and oddly tensioning wires makes me sad. It is a great work. It is just implemented in a way that ruins it.
Wires that are less or more part of the work as well as a freaking smooth control of the motors could have made this really nice. I would play with speeds, but usually have it manoeuvre very slowly on a 3 dimensional spline. Just to randomly go into a swift motion. Brownian motions.
There are endless possibilities: At specific times of the days it could perform a ‘ball drop’. Every July 25th it could engage in mostly helical patterns. Eventually somebody would figure out that it is the birthday of Rosalind Franklin.
But of course all that fancy stuff would only make sense if the freaking wires would run smooth. Which they clearly don’t.