# Inside a Tinguely Machine

A guided look inside a playful kinetic sculpture in the style of Jean Tinguely: one motor, belts, gears, a crank, a cam and a hammer, and the found objects tangled in its frame

By Bertil Chapuis

Topic: Machines

[Open the interactive Jig](https://ask.jig.com/j/hWehc7JWVdjc)

## Transcript

### 1. A machine that does nothing

This rattling sculpture is built from scrap: bicycle wheels, rubber belts, gears, a broken piano and an old bathtub\. It works very hard and makes nothing at all\. That is the joke, and the art\. Drag anywhere to look around it\.

The Swiss artist Jean Tinguely built machines like this from junk, starting in the 1950s\.

### 2. One small motor

Everything starts here, at one small electric motor\. It spins a shaft, and its shaking runs through the welded frame, so the whole sculpture rattles\. Switch it off and on, or click the motor, to watch the machine fall asleep and wake up\.

Many of Tinguely's drawing machines, the Méta\-Matics, ran on a single motor\.

### 3. Belts make speeds

Rubber belts carry the turning from wheel to wheel\. When a small pulley drives a big wheel, the big wheel turns slowly\. When a big one drives a small one, it spins fast\. The two gears turn opposite ways because their teeth push each other\.

The motor's pulley is 7 centimetres across and drives a wheel 30 centimetres across, so that wheel turns about four times slower\.

### 4. A wobble becomes a jerk

A pin sits off\-centre on the crank wheel\. A rod links that pin to a long arm, so every turn of the wheel pushes the arm up and pulls it down again\. The arm jerks back and forth, waving a feather duster and jingling its bells\.

This link between turning and back\-and\-forth motion is called a crank\. Steam trains use the same link the other way round\.

### 5. The hammer and the drum

A snail\-shaped cam slowly lifts the hammer arm higher and higher\. When the cam's step comes round, the arm drops and the hammer bangs the dented drum\. Press the button, or click the hammer, to bang it yourself\.

A cam is a wheel with a bumpy edge\. Its shape decides how the part resting on it moves\.

### 6. Treasure from the junkyard

Tinguely built with things other people threw away\. A piano with missing keys, an old bathtub on claw feet, brass bells and a feather duster all ride along\. None of them does its normal job here\.

His 1960 machine Homage to New York included a piano, a bathtub and bicycle wheels, all painted white\.

### 7. Look inside

Some of the busiest parts hide under covers\. Inside the motor, copper coils use electricity to make a magnetic pull that keeps the rotor spinning\. Inside the piano, felt hammers wait in a row in front of the strings\.

The covers lift away on this step only\. Go back a step and they close again\.

### 8. Motion for its own sake

Every wheel spins at its own speed, arms jerk, the drum bangs, and nothing is made\. Tinguely wanted people to laugh, listen and enjoy movement itself\. His Homage to New York was built to destroy itself, and it ran for 27 minutes\.

Chaos I, a Tinguely machine in Columbus, Indiana, is about 9 metres tall and has 12 motors\.