Sisyphus in Hiding

Here's our old pal Sisyphus again, this time trying to avoid his responsibilities by hiding in a box.

My core inspirations were these:

1) Claude Shannon's Ultimate Machine (aka Most Useless Machine).

2) The availability of a nice old microscope box.

3) The astonishing human capacity for denial.

This machine was built between December 28th, 2010 and January 20th, 2011 as an entry in the "1st Crankahead Automata Contest", organized by Sergio Pinese (thanks, Sergio!). See the website at http://www.crankahead.com/ for details.

This machine is a sort of cousin to the "Most Useless Machine" or "Ultimate Machine", originally built by Claude Shannon. (See http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/the_unspeakable.php for some history.) Many versions can now be found on the internet, almost all of which use electronics. I wanted to get a similar effect purely mechanically.

Still photos can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dogrocket/sets/72157625756904245/

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• kinetic
• art
• automaton
• automata
• sisyphus
• little
• man
• mechanical
• most
• useless
• machine
• ultimate
• claude
• shannon

[artistkeith3]

Giving Ganson a run for his money. Although his would have been metal.

[Ilamarea]

Awesome... :S

I'd like to have that guy in my house :S

If I had my house...

[Dukavos]

WOW man

[scrubs]

beautiful.

[geegeevindaloo]

Wonderful work, I love the creaky sounds!

[SaskView]

Awesome work Dave!

[automatamaker1]

genius

[mdepfl]

Sisyphus in the third stall, now that would be a hoot! Your work is fascinating Dave.