San Franciscan artist Scott Weaver deserves some sort of award, although I can't work out which one, for his interactive sculpture Rolling Through The Bay. Get a tour of it here.
Interviewed recently by Suzanne Labarre of Co.Design, creator Scott Weaver gives an amazing speed-tour of his sculpture, which has multiple narrative roller-coasters in-built. With four major routes through the 'city' (and each with sub-routes it seems), Weaver chucks in a few ping pong balls and begins his story as they weave through suburbs, across the Golden Gate Bridge and everywhere else it seems.
Weaver has detailed the sculpture as a personal archive, recording for example the birth date and time of his family, and as a third-generation San Franciscan, I'm sure each remarkably detailed and beautifully ornamented piece of the sculpture is embedded with an equally detailed sub-plot.
The other amazing aspect of the sculpture/model/city is the spatial configuration that Weaver has nimbly curated. Like Parisian Situtationists, Weaver has reconstructed multiple narratives (psychogeographic maps perhaps?) of San Francisco (very literally tied together by the ping-pong ball tracks), but in a seemingly crazy move (one you can only make when the work has been in progress for 34 years), Weaver has woven the narratives three-dimensionally in a sophisticated web of story, geography, building and icon.
The video produced by Co.Design is the only way to get some idea of this piece of work, which I think is a great encouragement to consider the personal models we have of our cities, but never really get to explore in as much sophistication and love as Scott Weaver.
See the video and some more images here.
The overall web of stories.. amazing.
Structure anyone?
The inspired hand of the artist..
Scott Weaver's profile is here, also out of interest you can inspect some of the individual components that make up the overall 9' x 7' city.