Leonardo's Egg

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Estaminé was invited by Mindshake PT to be among 32 other artists challenged to create their own Ovo do Leonardo (Leonardo's Egg). All these eggs were part of an exhibition held to commemorate the World Creativity Week as well as the 565th birthday of Leonardo da Vinci.

As we are fascinated da Vinci's incredible inventions, we thought we should make a tribute to them; also, we believed this was the perfect opportunity to step out of our comfort zone and produce an object we had been thinking about for a long time: a cardboard marble machine.

The two main ideas were, on one hand, that its route should represent a loop; and, on the other hand, that the machine would be powered by people's interaction.

Since we wanted to have a visual approach related to the sketches made by da Vinci for his inventions, scrawled and raw, we chose cardboard as the main material. The object represents an egg as the central part of the machine, placed on a pedestal. A marble lifter, based on the original design by Matthias Wandel, composes this pedestal. This mechanism, which invites people to interact with it, helps the balls to reach the top of the central tube. Once there, the balls fall around the spiral, step by step, finishing their route in the marble lifter again.

This was a lengthy project with several tests and failures, the kind of project that allows you to learn a whole deal.

Unfortunately, the marble lifter does not work as we expected – we believe that maybe cardboard is not the best material, as it produces too much friction, and the numerous marbles in the central tube create too much weight.

It is comforting to think that even da Vinci designed machines that did not work! Despite it and overall, we are happy for the challenge and the lessons we learnt from it.