Color Coaster is an interactive colorful audio-kinetic ball machine sculpture on an architectural scale - an attraction that draws visitors to the Stepping Stones Museum for Children’s tower and holds them in a whimsy of light, color, and motion.

 

Capturing sunlight as it streams into the tower, Color Coaster’s prisms, mirrors, and crystals scatter light in a moving dance on the tower’s inner walls and floor. Tracks pierce the tower’s wall to extend the experience overhead into the museum, where brightly colored polycarbonate elements, activated by the motion of balls, create ever-changing patterns of reflected light and color. Directing balls through a maze of chutes, gates, and switches, children and adults are engaged in hands-on play. Visitors study the twists and turns of the colorful balls along their path, tracking mechanical motions that reveal the machine’s inner workings while honing observational skills. Color Coaster is in itself a giant mechanical toy, a collection of simple mechanisms interconnected in an archetypal ‘invention’ machine..

 

This ball machine was designed by George Rhoads in collaboration with Rock Stream Studios.

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Date:

1999

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Location:

Stepping Stones Museum for Children, Norwalk, CT

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Dimensions:

27’ x 7’ 

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Artist:

George Rhoads