Do Nothing Machines

A salt shaker rolls across a table, dropping salt along the way and tips over a spatula resting on a coffee tin. The coffee tin rolls and falls abruptly over the edge of a stack of books. The weight of the coffee tin is perceptible. A thud, a click after, a brush weighted down by a lock rushes rapidly down the slope of a ruler (what else are rulers for, but a surface to slide down). The brush scoops the fallen salt on to a spoon. Passing the salt, wait for it.

What role was each actor meant to play, were they used for their weight, heft or shape? In this ballet of moving objects, no one is meaningless, not a paper clip nor a grain of salt. And the anticipation! The not knowing what’s going to happen next, it’s all edge of your seat action. Those are the greatest Rube Goldberg machines.

If you have a long table this is a useful way to pass the salt to the opposite end. Pass the Salt, by Joseph, a Youtube creator.

While we grapple with meaning making in our daily pursuits, there are some things that exist for no reason at all. Hours of labor are put into making something that does very little. Rube Goldberg machines take an extra ordinary effort to accomplish a trifling task. The machines are named after American cartoonist, Rube Goldberg who designed and drew eccentric contraptions that employed the forces of pulleys, wheels, cogs, strings, spoons, fans, balls, windows, doors, parrots and candles.

Rube Goldberg lived in the golden era of inventions, a time when people were filing patents for things like a Hat With Integrated Radio, Wooden Bathing Suits, a Single Wheel Motorcycle(!). Goldberg just took this madness one step further. The contraptions that he dreamt up were a “symbol of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.” My favourite one is this no-more-oversleeping alarm clock that takes away your bed so you literally cannot snooze.

The drawings are labelled sequentially and come with a description of how it works (see image above). He never built any of these machines, but by 1930s, the phrase “Rube Goldberg” had appeared the dictionary, to mean, ‘Having a fantastically complicated improvised appearance or to be deviously complex and impractical’.

In 1957, Charles and Ray Eames designed a whimsical do nothing machine with the colors and all the lightness of summer. Do-nothing but bring joy, that’s what this machine does.

In 1957, the Eameses designed the SOLAR DO-NOTHING MACHINE. Whimsical and joyful as was everything that the Eames couple made.

In 1989, the Rube Machine Contest became a national competition and in 2013, the national collegiate contest moved from the Purdue campus to COSI Columbus in Ohio. Every year, the contest sets up a task that needs to be accomplished in no more than 70 steps, and in under 2 minutes. Past challenges have included, zipping a zipper, applying a bandage, toasting a slice of bread, assembling a hamburger.

How we love seeing the sequence of interlocked events that make the machine work, the visual display of cause and effect. Daniel Kahneman says, "We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone's intention." Children as young as 6 months old, see a sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. Rube Goldberg machines are a visual firework display of cause and effect, the very epitome.

This piece of art was directed by CRICTOR, Rafael Sommerhalder Commissioned by Kuratorium Aargau 2010