Gravitas Sugit is a sculpture and game where school kids cooperate and compete in building a machine that moves a heavy ball from a pinball game from the start area at level 1 to the goal at the end of level four. The sculpture was developed to participate in what is known as The Cultural School Satchel in Norway – a government funded program to introduce art and artists for all school children in Norway. In particular the sculpture was shown at our studio in Skien where school children visited our studio, got an introduction to our art practise and the worked together on building the marble run machine sculpture.

My original idea was to do a workshop with inspiration from two different sources: One was an old favourite of mine: Der Lauf der Dinge, a post-apocalyptic machine or series of events made and filmed in 1987 by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The other were the fantasticaly over-complicated machines of cartoonist, sculptor and inventor Rube Goldberg. Time restraints and the safety of our children ruled out the (often burning) materials used in Der Lauf der Dinge, so I opted for a strict system of machined and laser cut parts that fit in an 8mm grid on a freestandig sculpture.

The machine has four sides or levels. On each level there is an electromagnet in the top left corner and a goal area in the lower right corner. When the ball on level 1 reaches goal, the ball on level 2 is released from its magnet. When the last ball stops in the goal of level 4 a small receipt is printed showing the lap times from each level and the total time. The challenge for the children is to build a marble run where the ball moves as slow as possible: Friction is the friend of the children, gravity is the enemy, gravity sucks…

The sculpture is designed in Rhino and machined on our CNC. The tracks are laser cut. The timer circuit is a modified version of Richards Crazy Kart Lap Timer thanks goes out to Richard for the tutorial :).

This project is still in progress and we’re contemplating making a school kit where the physics happening in the machine is discussed and broken down into experiments for school children. Gravitas Sugit has since it’s debut in march in Skien also visited The Cultural School Satchel-Laboratory in Trøndelag, and was presented at Øyepå-conference in Bodø, September in 2024.

Photo by Tobias Liljedahl