The New York Times: Any busy morning routine can feel like a bit of a tap dance. But recently, Joseph Herscher turned getting ready for the day into a comically intricate work of choreography.
Mechanized choreography, that is. Herscher, known online as Joseph’s Machines, has collected millions of social followers with videos of his pointedly inefficient chain-reaction machines. He’s a Rube Goldberg for the digital age.
2 comments:
This is so interesting in its many connects to live entertainment, theater, and also our classes at CMU, since we will be making one of these later this year. First off, the live aspect is unique compared to all of the content online, and so much better for being live, just like live theater still has that appeal and impact that recorded theater or movies just can't have. Secondly, speaking of theater, I think the imperfections of it is what interests and thrills me the most. The fact that it only worked 25% of the time, and that the audience got to see the successes along with the failures is really cool to me, and something I would love to watch---its not a polished product, but instead a work in progress constantly. Finally, this is a good source of inspiration for our Rube Goldberg machine, although I don't think we are allowed or want to have a human directly involved.
As any undergraduate at CMU school of Drama, I have complex feelings about the rube goldberg machine. This guy does make me wonder if incorporating a person into one of those machines would make the process harder. A person’s movements are probably not quite as repeatable as say, a marble running down a ramp, but on the other hand, if something were to be slightly off, a person might be able to account for that small difference in the action. It really makes the rube goldberg machine even more analogous to a stage play where there are a bunch of moving parts and everything needs to fall in place pretty perfectly every time. Though hopefully the success rate of a typical show is a little higher than 25%. The idea of trying to travel a giant machine like this around the country sounds like quite the feat, but I hope this team succeeds in making it happen.
Post a Comment