It’s Sunday! Time to sit back, relax, and enjoy a genuinely satisfying session of Suck the Balls. Designer Niklas Roy’s interactive installation shows just how much fun can be had with pneumatic tubes, a vacuum, and a pit of yellow plastic spheres. (Spoiler alert: lots of fun.)
Great gifs by Prosthetic Knowledge.
No, this is not some next-level Chuck-E-Cheese action; in fact, the actual backdrop is part of the charm. The whole thing takes place at Kraków’s grand Potocki Palace, home to Poland’s branch of the Goethe Institute, which recently introduced SPIELTRIEB!, a series of projects aimed at exploring the evolving notion of Play. Play, of course, can encompass many, many things! Which leads us back to Suck the Balls.
240 feet of pneumatic tubes wind around the building’s historic staircase, ending in the ball pit (which is more like a little chamber). Someone stands inside and vacuums up the orbs — the suction power is actually a basic household cleaner equipped with a motion-sensor — which then whizz around and, in a delightful climax at the end of their journey, get dumped back onto the lucky tester’s head. (Check out Roy’s site for a more in-depth description of how he made it happen.)
Look at what a blast Günter Schultz had beta-testing it out:
I don’t believe you if you say you wouldn’t. [Prosthetic Knowledge]