In 2006 Illinois alternative rock band OK Go surprised and inspired us with their Here It Goes Again-treadmill-video. The music clip, being one of the most often watched an absolute peak in the internet video era. Only of this morning I watched OK Go’s new video, from their song This Too Shall Pass; it’s equally mind-boggling. (And oh my God, it’s available in 1080p, so play this baby full-screen!)
Personally I thought the video was one big creative outburst. Engineers must have thought about every single part of the machine and all the parts had to be joined, and they must have had tremendous amounts of fun in doing so. To my surprise the actual filming only took two days while 60 people were working on the project. It must have required enormous manpower to reset the track each time.
According to Wired the music video was filmed in sixty takes of which most didn’t last longer then thirty seconds because something went wrong. But when the machine had fully ‘rolled’ it took about an hour in order to reset it(!). Interestingly enough Adam Sadowsky, one of the engineers that designed the project, said that one of the design requirements was that it couldn’t feature any ‘magic’; Sadowsky: “Because we are all engineers, [..] we love magic. We love computers, and servomotors, and fire, and all of that stuff.”
But what did the OK Go bro’s actually ‘dance’ with in their creative music video? It turns out to be nothing less then a Rube Goldberg Machine, or abbreviated: RGM. In common language this would be best described as “an over-engineered machine that performs a simple task in a complex way”. This certainly applies to the thing in the video because there have to be more efficient ways to launch paint in the direction of four innocently-looking guys.
Anyway, the machine got it’s name from the American cartoonist, author and – not surprisingly – engineer and inventor Rube Goldberg. He used to draw cartoons featuring the machines that eventually got his name like the one below.
As an applied physics student who also fancies an interest in the Arts I find Goldberg’s work from the artwork gallery on his website nothing less but flattering. I’ve never seen such a complex – but working – ‘simplified pencil sharpener’.
(And cheers to SuperForester Claire for sending this in!)
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