Students built a piece of a Rube-Goldberg machine for STRP BIËNNALE. Photo | Bart van Overbeeke
  • Student

'Garish machine' by ID at STRP Biennial

It’s a ten-day art, music and technology festival: the STRP Biennial, which opened its doors in the Klokgebouw at Strijp-S on March 1. Theme of the festival is ‘City of Cyborgs’. Dr.ir. Koert van Mensvoort of Industrial Design at TU/e will be delivering a lecture at STRP College. His ID colleague Bert Lonsain and his project group will be participating in ‘The New Machine Era’.

by

In light of the STRP Biennial, industrial designer and ID lecturer Lonsain set up a project for the construction of a Rube-Goldberg Machine (The New Machine Era). It’s a complex mechanism that calculates simple problems slowly and indirectly.

Through Facebook, Lonsain drummed up students to work with him on the machine – an extracurricular activity – in the Matrix building. Their part, themed ‘the student room’, will eventually form the middle of the giant contrivance. The process is low budget, meaning parts are picked up from garbage dumps and second-hand stores. In a few days, their part will be connected to those of other teams, made up of people with very different backgrounds: from former Philips techies to theater designers. Lonsain: “It’s going to be an ingenious, garish machine; it’s such fun.”

The STRP Biennial can be visited from March 1-10, tockets can be bought at the STRP website.

Share this article