I ’M IN RESIDENCY AT ART CENTER COLLEGE made too tight and rigid, then the mobile has a
of Design in Pasadena, Calif., and it didn’t take lifeless, clockwork, phony feel, much like a Soviet
me long to figure out that most everybody here bureaucracy. If the links are too loose, then it gets
makes stuff. all corrupt and herky-jerky; its extreme fringes start
Here at design school, it’s a demo-or-die situation. clattering around in violent incompetence, much
For instance, everybody in my “Ecology of Things” like the Bush administration.
class is busily making demos and prototypes A successful mobile artfully combines central
for highly distributed, embeddable computer control and local initiative, artfully poised at the
chips. These microchips are supplied to the stu- fertile edge of chaos. Ideally, the thing should dance.
dents courtesy of the research and design wing My own model mobile (after many returns to the
of Sun Microsystems. drawing board) dances just fine now. Unfortunately,
Since I’m an author and have spent my entire since I lack physical skill at artfully working steel wire,
career blabbing, I decided my design students would
surely benefit by seeing me build something myself. The prospect of ubiquitous, ad-hoc’ed, networked, “A vintage Calder pervasive, teensy, radio-frequency, spooky, action- mobile goes for upwards
at-a-distance, internet-of-things-ish, Java-swap- ping, motorizable chips is not just talky, but a little of half a million bucks
daunting. Luckily, there’s already a sweet, artsy, familiar, and highly popular version of a working but Sandy Calder used “ecology of things.” It’s from the pre-digital age. to be able to whip one
It’s called a “mobile.” Alexander Calder (1898-1976), that Modernist out in a day.”
artist with a mechanical engineering degree, invented
the mobile in the early 1930s. The materials for it’s ugly; it looks like it was dropped off a ten-story
mobiles — steel wire, scrap aluminum, and paint building. That doesn’t matter, though, since the
— are cheap and easy to find. A vintage Calder original model, made from paper plates, was mere-
mobile goes for upwards of half a million bucks at ly the working prototype for a far more ambitious
art auctions now, but Sandy Calder used to be able effort. My completed mobile is supposed to have
to whip one out in a day. So how tough could it be a motor on board, and an embedded microchip to
to just make one? assure interaction with passing humans. It’s going
Equipped with hardware-store wire and cheap to be about 40 feet across.
Chinese hand tools from the local Target store, I This entails scaling up my model by a factor of soon discovered that it’s, in fact, dead easy to make ten. Scaling up chaos by a factor of ten is a rather a mobile. A mobile is simply a cascade of levers, nonlinear effort. The sweet and subtle balancing a multilevel, energy-trophic ecology of levered forces within my tiny mobile maquette are packing elements, if you will. The key to success is the some serious heft now. In my misspent youth, relationship between elements. If the links are I used to stretch barbed wire and string Texan cattle
Photography by Bruce Sterling
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