MILITARY BIKES

From our Canadian correspondent:

Hey Sean, I'm not really into motorcycles but have seen these retro military-style ones on my local streets in Liberty Village in Toronto. Visit the site and check out the black one and the sand-colored one I saw today . . . .




I inspected them up close . . . they look like the kind of thing an attaché would ride up in to hand a letter to Winston Churchill . . .





Yeah, like maybe if Winston was working for the other side . . . or maybe some deep cover Werhmacht mole from his extensive personal intelligence network . . .




Checking out those first two something struck me as odd about these bikes - I've seen a LOT of WWII-era Wehrmacht Beamers - over in Europe and in the military museums at Fort Bragg - and I used to own an R100CS so I know my dual-opposed air-cooled twins - there was something wrong and I don't just mean the US star on the side car of a military BMW then it struck me these are modern-day retros inspired by the WWII era military workhorses . . .




. . . then I did the man thing and actually read the fine print (see below) - S.L.


"Designed By BMW in 1938, the CJ 750 is a decommissioned vintage l966 Chinese Army motorcycle."

AMAZING KINETIC BALLS ON STRINGS

This is an amazing display of 714 metal balls on strings. It really gets creative after 1 minute, so be patient. This display was created by the German company ART+COM on display at the BMW Museum in Munich. 714 individual metallic spheres seem to float weightlessly in the air, rising and sinking haphazardly, then assuming rhythm and pattern as various undulating shapes, then eventually taking on discernible vehicular form – before the cycle starts over again.





One of ART+COM’s designers to explains:

“For us the design process starts in a chaos; it’s a chaos of many, many different ideas that are independent of each other, that are just floating around. And then from this chaos, different shapes begin to emerge… that then gradually split into several shapes – different kinds of ideas that compete with each other as a kind of representation of finding the right solution to a design challenge. And then given the context, the final step in the narrative, you will see a real recognisable shape of a car.”





The metal orbs are suspended from slender steel wires attached to individually controlled motors, with the whole arrangement covering an area of six square meters. Brought into motion, the shifting cyclical narrative plays out over 7 minutes of escalating beauty.






Making the Kinetic Sculpture was challenging; the building where it is displayed proved problematic due to vibrations from an adjacent factory – less than ideal when working with fine mechanics. Then a software bug made the installation move up instead of down and almost destroy itself – not so dramatic when you are working with pixels; much more so with physical objects.





The engineer in me LOVES this. Here’s the longer version of the piece with more tranquil music. Enjoy:






All images: ART+COM