Kick-Out

Of all the sketches I've been working on over the last few months, this one is one of the earliest. The original working name was 'plinthball' but I don't think it works. Clearly the thought is to house this piece in a gallery, placing a ball on a plinth appears effortless, but it's not that simple. The ball is popped out by the kicker but always falls back into it's hole, in a futile repetition.

This repetition is a theme in my earlier sketch ideas (also see Ball Saver). To me this relates to a few things. Firstly to the game of pinball; where you must make repetitive targets to obtain points. The second relates to printmaking; where the process to create a multiple edition is by the repetitive task of printing the same artwork.

The ball never quite settles, like it is always trying to escape the confines of the plinth, the only thing keeping it there is gravity.

Viewers would be welcome to pickup the ball, shake it, drop it. I like that even with all these external forces it would still always find its way back to its pointless home on the plinth.

Original mockup, maybe this is how it scales up, with multiple holes?

I think in its current format it is still a prototype. I've tested a few ideas to execute it, but the most appropriate for now is to run a tiny 5v solenoid (to kick the ball) from a 9v battery and a switch in the base, which is operated by the viewer.

Tiny solenoid!

A video posted by Jono Sandilands (@jonosandilands) on May 14, 2015 at 1:21pm PDT

I wanted to avoid using large, potentially dangerous power supplies (that's the next inevitable step!). Main reasoning is I need to keep things in their simplest format to explore these ideas as sketches, but also to keep my costs down.