Dave Hall’s Elaborately Hand-Cranked Automata

The mechanics of a basic hand-cranked automaton are not complicated — a few pieces of wood, a crank, a bit of bent wire — and the movements that come out of it are correspondingly simple. Dave Hall takes that starting point and adds a level of complexity that borders on the absurd, driving dozens of interconnected parts from a single handle.

The pleasure of automata is mechanical honesty: you can see every cause and every effect, and the machine’s charm comes from refusing to hide how it works. Hall’s contraptions are the genre at its most indulgent, in the best sense.

More: Dave Hall.