Cascade Kinetic Sculpture - 1980

Cascade is a sculpture I designed and built in 1980. Like all my early work this is a weight driven sculpture with a relatively short run time of 20 minutes or so. I used a version catch and release ball mechanism concept that I originally designed for Kaleidoscope 1 in 1979. It's a bit noisy and jerky at times but I was thrilled that it actually worked and had an interesting motion.

I've used very short weight strings in the video so I can show both weights at the same time. Normally the string length would be set so that the light weight starts on the floor and the heavy weight just below the sculpture. The weight on the right has about 5 pounds of metal encased in the wood shape. The left hand weight is the counter weight and is solid wood.