Machine With Wishbone

flutter, drip, roll, drool, and undulate

Hi, I'm sorry you must excuse me, it's been a while since I wrote and now I'm trying to get back in the swing, hopefully some of you can relate and the rest can sympathize, or at least attempt to. We are cracking the windows open, airing out the room, retrieving a can of seltzer from the fridge, opening that, starting a new document, and just like that, we've already written a paragraph. Great!

Today's look is at "Machine With Wishbone", just one of many wonderful videos by Arthur Ganson, of his magnificent kinetic sculptures.

video is one and a half minutes long

In addition to making great sculptures, the videos are also great. They really complement the work, drawing out the details and setting them in time, and waiting just long enough to reveal the total picture. It's pretty inspiring from a documentation perspective-- I don't know how many of you have ever tried to photograph an artwork but it isn't a trivial task.

There's a lot of sculptures on his channel, each with its own short vid-- I strongly recommend clicking around. They're all machines, but not of industry or war, or even capitalism. Each one simply does it's thing, whatever that is, and at the same time displays the complicated system that enables this simplicity. Or another way of looking at it is that many of these machines have a feeling of just thinking about something, but at the same time thinking about nothing; as such, it may be helpful to the viewer to see the gears turning, and to see no real progress being made, but for the process to be enjoyable. Or we could move back a step, and without thinking about them, just enjoy them. Inventions flutter, drip, roll, drool, and undulate, and generally just do their thing, as do we all. I imagine a dialogue with the creator: What does this do? This. Why does it do that? I made it this way. Why did you make it this way? It’s nice.

Again, I strongly recommend clicking around his channel, everything is wonderful, and each sculpture / vid is a short little gag that will stay with you for a while, perfect. I didn't even pick the best one to showcase, I just picked one at random, so you can maybe discover "the best one" (although I personally haven't decided which one is the best one). [YouTube].

Here's a video of the band Fat Worm of Error playing a score they wrote to accompany a compilation of these vids. They're great, I love them, and this is great, but it's not the best way to see the machines for the first time, so maybe come back to this one later. CW: frenetic sound [YouTube, 28min]. Shoutout to ZEBU for filming so many killer Western Mass noise shows!

Peace everyone :)

If someone sent this to you because you're often thinking about something but at the same time thinking about nothing, you may also enjoy other things I write. This is Pleasant Realms, an email newsletter about mostly non-stressful YouTube videos. Again, sorry I haven't been on here in a sec! New one next week :)