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The 2012 Oxford Kinetics Festival: April Fools’ Day filled with Rube Goldberg machines, monster bicycles, kinetic art, water bottle rockets, lots of chicken dance, a nine foot teeter totter on wheels, Happen Inc’s ToyLab, weather balloon rides for toys, prizes and more! With your help we’ll be even bigger and better in April 2013!
http://www.OxfordKineticsFestival.org
Jacob Tonski is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance.
A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay.
These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.
Tonski holds an MFA from the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA. He studied computer science at Brown University and worked as a Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios. He has lived in Berkeley, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Paris and Providence, grew up in West Virginia, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Interactive Media Studies at Miami University of Ohio.