The 70′s were a funny time in skateboarding. At times, the industry and the public at large tended to view it almost as a carnival ride or amusement park attraction. Case in point, Skateball. Skate and Annoy received a couple old pictures of a Skateball installation at the Olympic Skatepark in Crystal Lake Illinois a few years back when SnA was being updated on a very infrequent basis. Skateball was basically pinball on a halfpipe, where the skater simulated the ball. It’s one of those things you hear rumors about but don’t quite give them credit unless you actually see it. Five pictures and a little history on Skate and Annoy.
The Kinetic Sculpture is a metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding in art and design. 714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires attached to individually-controlled stepper motors and covering the area of six square meters, animate a seven minute long mechatronic narrative. In the beginning, moving chaotically, then evolving to several competing forms that eventually resolve to the finished object, the Kinetic Sculpture creates an artistic visualisation of the process of form-finding in different variations.
Simple motor actions, like moving marbles upward or downward between two cardboard boxes, may not seem meaningful. But a study published April 2010 in Cognition shows that motor actions can partly determine people’s emotional memories.
Moving marbles upward caused participants to remember more positive life experiences, and moving them downward to remember more negative experiences, according to Daniel Casasanto (MPI and Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and Katinka Dijkstra (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). ‘Meaningless’ motor actions can make people remember the good times or the bad.
When people talk about positive and negative emotions they often use spatial metaphors. A happy person is on top of the world, but a sad person is down in the dumps. Some researchers believe these metaphors are a clue to the way people understand emotions: not only do we use spatial words to talk about emotional states, we also use spatial concepts to think about them.
