The BMW Museum's kinetic sculpture takes your brain to another dimension
By Joshua Topolsky 
posted Jul 6th 2008 3:04AM
posted Jul 6th 2008 3:04AM
[Via BMWCCA]
posted Jul 6th 2008 3:04AM
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fail
Why not?
325i
Succeed
do motorcycles count?
F800S here
I'll bite - 525ti
E46 -01 M3
335i 2007
suckers!
Audi 4 life!
:P
"Recently opened"? I visited the BMW museum in Munich in 1988. Suppose "recent" is relative.
It was closed for renovation in 2004 and recently (June 21st) reopened. I suspect your experience from 1988 will differ from those of today.
easy on the eyes, horrific on the ears.
And now my eyes are trippin.
Like after 12 hours of Guitar Hero.
this is why i own a bmw =]
2007 z4 roadster :P
Why cant the man be proud of his car. Geez, you guys low ranking him are a bunch of losers.
Because he set off the cockometer :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7_bGJpsY4s
Actually on the newest episode of Top Gear, they have labeled BMW's cool. The "cocks" that drove BMW have now moved to Audi, so now Audi drivers are "cocks" and are uncool.
when you buy a convertible, you betray men everywhere.
performance > looking cool (or so you think)
lol oh my bad haha i believe the girls love it when the tops down =]
with me crusin cali beaches all day
then again i could always close the top and rape you in 6th gear ?!?1
impossible to appreciatte with the 'soft porn' soundtrack, it ended up just looking like some show off sequence in a 90's verhoven movie.
it's the dividing line between a piece of art and a piece of engineering really, had the clip a more minimalist, modern and overtly electronic soundtrack, as opposed to the shitty synth keys only ever found in early 90's m.o.r. shit like whitney houston and micheal bolton etc, it might have at least made me think "oh cool" but instead it it just made me feel like i had left the german channel on past midnight.
Kenny G was unavailable. Give them some credit!
;)
Dear Investors,
BMW has invested 300 billion Deutsche Marks on alternative fuels, and as you can see in this display, we have high hopes for BMW's continued dominance of the prestige auto industry well into the future...
...a greener, brighter future.
...ohhh, errmmm, uhmmm...
Look at our competence with balls-on-strings!
Deutsche Mark? Was ist das?
Euros. But management is oldskool!
Well, the music reminded me of a good old pr0n from the 80s. Nicely done!
i enjoyed the music.. it soothed my ears
and even though the balls werent magneticall suspended, but used strings, it was really impressive anyway
I was just going to say; hate the music, cheap synthesizer set to option 1 to save a penny, lets down the whole thing 100% (not that it's that great to start with IMHO).
possible christmas tree future
It's not gay, the balls are not touching.
Innovation maybe but not so High Tech..
If this is what BMW can offer in 3D technology in the year 2008 well..
The only thing I can say in that case is that I am disappointed.
Anybody check out the new 7 series yet???......Its awesome!
BMW's make very high end crap. Sorry, but I would just never buy one. I love people who buy old BMW's that can't afford to repair them. Man I love luxury junkers. It's a hobby of mine, watching for those. BMW's are top but I do love a good piece of crap Jag too.
I have a hobby, too: clicking the little red minus at the top right of posts like yours. There, done!
"the last time I saw this many balls hanging . . . ", there's a joke in there for sure
....I was in the locker room on senior day at the YMCA
You guys complaining that this isn't done with magnets, exactly how would anyone do that? I mean, I can see suspending a bunch of metal balls in the air with magnets but controlling them to the point you could create precise and interesting shapes? I guess if you could pull that off it might be wasted on a simple sculpture.
Dangling balls at the ends of wires, and reeling them vertically with stepper motors does not make this in any way "kinetic". The balls do not interact with one another, and the only use gravity has is keeping the wires taught. Any energy generated by the motion of the balls in their vertical travels is dampened by the motors which drive them.
kinetic also means something that moves though.... maybe its just used in that sense. What else would you call it? just a moving art piece?
OMG the music almost made me shoot my brains out.
A car with balls of steel
to make up for the ones that the prick driving it lacks.
@Tom great post.
@Paul... great post, two!
To all those who think this is anything short of impressive, please try and remember that each of the spheres in this installation is most likely driven by a servo motor with a spool of line attached to it. That works out to what appears to be over ten thousand motors, all tightly coordinated to follow smoothly controlled signal profiles. I see many people every day on the roadway who seem to have difficulty coordinating two or three signal profiles (steering, accelerator, and sometimes cell phone). Show a little respect to the engineering and creativity involved in this display.
I gotta get a hold of a soundtrack like that. Very soothing.
SOOOOO FREAKING BOOOORING
@chris joseph: "Kinetic Art" is a term of art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_art
And the thing that impressed me about this is the fact that they managed to control the inherent elasticity of monofilament, in both the horizontal and vertical directions. I'm surprised that the balls don't bounce at the top or bottom of their travel and that they're not vibrating from side to side. A regular servo motor would in all likelihood create significant horizontal motion due to deflection of the motor shaft, especially if the line is taught to reduce vertical bounce. My guess is there is a separate damping mechanism at work here. An impressive bit of engineering, whatever you think of BMW.
I can't be the only physics nerd in here that wants to use this to display complex three-dimensional graphs, can I?
you very well could be
i dont get how it works though
should prollly watch more than 5 seconds of the video.......
"pay close attention. de do de do de do de do DEE do de do de do de do"
...no one got the reference?
sad.
low ranked?
maybe folks don't get your reference to the reference...
or there are some Prodigy haters afoot
word.