Public Reaction
Overall the response has been a real boost to my ego. On opening night a young mother found me making some adjustments on the piece, stopped me, and said, "You made this, didn't you? It's phenomenal! My daughter is a really hard case, and I can't drag her away. This is really great." The Guard tells me that senior citizens come by during the quiet times and sometimes play with it for a half hour or more. The piece is a hit with the public, kids and adults. See attached sheets for more comments, or call the Museum.
History:
"Havin' a Ball", was the result of a request from show curator Ed Noisecat who had seen "The Tempest", a smaller kinetic piece which was once leased to The Children's Museum of Minnesota. The structure of "The Tempest." is a multi-tracked roller coaster with huge ball bearings as cars with a switching mechanism that is triggered as each ball passes, sending the next one down a different path. Children and adults tended to lay claim to the ball they had started, riding along in their imagination, and follow it carefully to the end. In "Havin' a Ball", I wanted to create a kinetic sculpture in the spirit of "The Tempest," an interactive piece full of ego surrogates, and vicarious adventure. I planned to build on the idea of multiple paths and make the piece begin with a wheel which would be spun to determine initial direction in a series of descents ranging from a precipitous fall to a highly interactive "Rube Goldberg" contraption. It would have highs and lows coupled to wild gyrating paths, slow swooping paths, pendulously predictable paths. I wanted it to also have a random trapdoor that could just drop you out of the game. The piece would show irony in the juxtaposition of the joyously possible and doggedly probable.
Objective:
When I originally conceived the piece, I envisioned it as a series of allegorical paths some exciting, some puzzling, some simple, some maybe even downright boring. I wanted the paths to be accessible to more than one input. I saw it as sort of an allegory of life, where it was possible to influence the outcome to a certain extent but where the path of the ball was also affected by the actions of others and a fickle pick left to fate.
I envisioned a slow moving "spectator path" that slowly circled the more active ones, a daring wild path, a playful wandering path and a dedicated purposeful "work path", and several others, involving teamwork.
Result:
I was ecstatic when I listened to an artist who had seen the show, describe it to another who had missed it. Without any direct contact with me, she described it in the same sort of allegorical terms in which it had been conceived.
Design and Production
| I laid out the exhibition space in a CAD file and started laying in my ideas around the architecture. |  |
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I needed to produce a piece that was resilient and reliable as well as interesting, since the show was to be up for four months.
I had several large 3" channel hoops which I realized would make an impressive loop the loop but would need containment to prevent direct access to the fast moving balls. I resolved the access problem by extending the definition of the spectator ring from slow track to perimeter crowd control fence.
I designed elevators, captive channel hand lifts, escalators, buckets on rotating wheels, and ramps with push sticks for moving the balls. Some of these methods work better than others but all have survived the 4 month break-in of this sculpture.
A system of caged tracks was designed to keep fast moving balls from jumping the track and hitting someone and also to make them difficult to steal. In the end I tried to build a series of five tracks, two of which, were in what doubled as a crowd control fence and three that offered more interesting alternatives.
Once the big hoop with a ball bucket in it had been conceived, I started playing with ways to make it more interesting visually. I awoke, dreaming of oriental fans popping open, and that became the basis for the colorful fans which fold themselves as they descend and pop open as they rise.
Production time to date is about a thousand hours, including working drawings, prototyping, in studio fabrication, and installation.
I received a contract with less than two months to installation and began preliminary drawings and prototyping of several elements while we renegotiated several unworkable points in the contract. I signed the contract and began the construction of the piece with a month and a half to the first day of installation and by the time the museum cut me a check there was only a month left. I mention these facts to illustrate the incredible pace at which this piece was designed and built, so that you might understand that there are still a few things that I would love to add to the piece and that after a four month shakedown, a few things need to be changed. With only had a month of production time; even with a thousand hours of intense work by myself, my associates and a few dedicated and immensely helpful friends, there are a number of things that didn't quite get done.; we just ran out of time. The figurative pieces are meant to be far more interactive with the ball path; it needs paint; and there are still two tracks which live only in my imagination and in a few partially finished sections in the studio. The piece works anyway, as is; but I'd love to finish it.
Physical Aspects
The piece is 20 by 26 by 15 feet high and features a series of tracks and balls which the kids (of all ages) manipulate with cranks, levers, ropes, and their hands. The balls are all captive so they can't be stolen or thrown. The sketch above shows the relative locations of some of the features of this piece. This is taken from the preconstruction cad file. Once design moved from CAD strategy to construction tactics the CAD drawing quickly fell behind reality in the rush to finish the piece. The path of the perimeter track is quite accurate though it does not show the base which adds a bit more to the overall dimensions. The three places marked hole are where I had to build around the columns in Landmark center, the fourth spot marked "building" is also where a column was, in this case it was to be clad with a rectangular building with a continuous spiral path around it top to bottom. Neither the building nor the elevator that was to serve it were used in the landmark installation.
The piece features a 12 foot diameter rotating ring with large colorful fans that pop open.
The design of the piece is somewhat modular so that, with some effort it could be reconfigured for a different space.
The perimeter track has two parallel spirals each circling five times before rolling the ball back to the central pickup.
A rope powered elevator lifts balls up to the ramp of a huge loop the loop.
The piece is meant to encourage cooperation. To start the balls rolling a person on one side of the piece must push balls up a ramp into a magazine which feeds an escalator operated from the other side of the piece, a single viewer can fill the magazine, walk around and turn the escalator crank. Balls then roll onto a spinning disk which randomly sends them off to the various tracks.
As it's laid out now, a small arm scoops up balls and dumps them into a chute which feeds a bucket on the large hoop, this lifts the ball up to the ceiling where it is caught in a basket and rolls down a track to a magazine inside a big gargoyle head. When prompted the gargoyle spits out a ball through a plastic tube and down a spiral chute to the same spinning disk mentioned above. Originally I had a coin slot on the Gargoyle but the museum staff asked me to remove it. I saw the Gargoyle as a kind of icon for blatant commercial exploitation. It was sculpted as a medusa's head with vipers for hair. It was blatantly overpriced and that was the point. Anyone could get a ball started for free with just a little bit of effort on the crank and the push rod. People would put in their quarters and it would spit out a ball. They'd say "is that all?" and then they'd get mad. So we replaced the coin slot with a push-button over my objections. I would rather have put up a sign that said, "Warning, the solicitor general has determined that this is a waste of money. Use at your own risk."
Maintenance
After several months on the piece the Flags show a need for laundering.
Moving parts need grease and oil.
The ropes that people use to run the elevators will wear out and need replacement, eventually. After four months the one on the elevator was showing wear and probably would need replacing at about six to eight months.
Previous experience indicates that the crank handles will eventually wear out and need to be replaced. I'd guess nine months to a year.
It needs to be dusted or vacuumed
Shakedown, four months of "break-in"
Part of the piece ran for three days in my shop prior to installation. Following installation I had to rebuild one small unit to alleviate an occasional jamming problem and I discovered that I needed additional guides near the banner hoop to keep the banners from catching.. We soon discovered that the grade on the ball return floor needed to be steeper in places, that the escalator crank needed a ratchet link to keep people from tuning it backwards and that one small gearmotor was underpowered. In that it was impractical to attempt these changes in the museum, the guard solved it by tapping either the balls or the underpowered little arm with a stick if they got stuck.. The grade will be changed, a ratchet installed and the gearmotor replaced, end of problem.
Further information:
If you would like more information on this, you can email, call, or write me or contact the Museum at:
References
Ruth Appelhof, Director
Lin Nelson-Mayson, Project Manager, Adventures in the Art Zone
URL: http://www.mtn.org/MMAA
Minnesota Museum of American Art
Landmark Center
5th at Market
St. Paul, MN 55102-1486
(612) 292-4355
