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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.

Date:

1999

Location:

Stepping Stones Museum for Children, Norwalk, CT

Dimensions:

27’ x 7’ 

Artist:

George Rhoads

Color Coaster

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COPYRIGHT © 2024

Creative Machines Inc.

4141 E. Irvington Rd.

Tucson, Arizona 85714

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Our Creative Machines shop is located on the ancestral lands of the Tohono O'odham Nation. We are nestled in the heart of Tucson, Arizona, a vibrant, culture-rich city, both presently and historically. This land was home to some of the earliest people in North America, the Hohokam, and we honor and respectfully acknowledge the indigenous nations that have stewarded this land since time immemorial. Today, Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized tribes, with Tucson being home to the Tohono O’odham and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe.

SUSTAINABILITY STATEMENT

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