kinetic sculptures

Susan Robb's "Warmth Giant Black Toobs" Mohsin

Susan Robb is a Seattle-based artist whose work includes these 50' long, air-filled, sun-powered sculptures made out of garbage-can liners:

At first the tubes seem to be moving in slow motion, but when humans enter the frame it becomes clear that the video's speed isn't manipulated.

Susan Robb’s says more than a billion tons of trash are dumped into the ocean every year. Oceanographers have found a swirling miasma of consumer plastics‚ plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic toys‚ the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. Plankton, fish, birds, and marine mammals all ingest these plastics (and the chemicals they contain and leach), which in turn we ingest. Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with biochemistry, uncovering how plastics not only effect planetary health but are also linked to cancer, diabetes, and endocrine malfunctions. Like Andy Warhol said, we are indeed (and literally) all becoming plastic. In Warmth, Giant Black Toobs, I use solar power and ambient breezes to give life to the ever-present black plastic garbage bag. Polypropylene garbage bags, 50 feet tall by 30 inches in diameter, are inflated with air by allowing the wind to fill them or by running with them. One end is staked to the ground; the other end is free. The sun does the rest. Employing a similar principle to that of hot air balloons, the sun heats the air inside the toobs, and since hot air is less dense then cold air, the toobs become buoyant. Solar-produced buoyancy, breezes, and internal convection work to transform this symbol of the (American) cycle of consumption and waste into seemingly sentient creatures, live plastic hybrids whose choreography brings to mind the very sea creatures our epoch's mass of waste effects

Another kinetic sculpture i really liked by Dutch artist Theo Jansen called Animari.

You don’t really appreciate his kinetic, walking sculptures till you watch a video.

Dutch artist Theo Jansen creates amazingly moving and a little bit weird insect- like sculptures, built from only plastic tubes and lemonade bottles.

Jansen wasn’t always a creator of life. He once studied physics, later quitting to become a painter. He caused near-panic in a town with his homemade “UFO” and invented an amazing painting machine in the following years. In 1990, he found the happy medium between physics and art with the creation of Animari. The number of tubes and the length of each tube determines the genetic “code” of each strandbeest (or beach animal), dictating how it will move and interact with its environment. Jansen wasn’t always a creator of life. He once studied physics, later quitting to become a painter. He caused near-panic in a town with his homemade “UFO” and invented an amazing painting machine in the following years. In 1990, he found the happy medium between physics and art with the creation of Animari. The number of tubes and the length of each tube determines the genetic “code” of each strandbeest (or beach animal), dictating how it will move and interact with its environment.

Let me know if you think he’s kinetics are amazing guys??? Mohsin.