Nils Völker’s ‘Bits and Pieces’: 108 Kinetic Spheres

For Bits and Pieces, Nils Völker took 108 toy Hoberman spheres, suspended them inside Berlin’s NOME Gallery and wired each one to a microcontroller. Attached to motors and synchronised to different rhythms and patterns, the spheres open and close until the room reads as a single organism breathing — brightly coloured, spiky molecules drifting on nearly invisible threads above a bare concrete floor.

The materials list gives away how the effect is built: plastic balls, wood, motors, custom electronics and programming, size variable. Völker has spent years turning cheap mechanism into choreography, and the pleasure of the piece is watching hundreds of small, dumb objects behave as though they shared a nervous system.

More: nilsvoelker.com · NOME Gallery.