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MÖBIUS: What A Stop-Motion Sculpture Looks Like

ENESS have created an interactive, collaborative sculpture on the streets of Melbourne.

Stop-motion and time-lapse, it seems, are the de facto standard for telling cutesy stories that are guaranteed to make the front page of Vimeo. Every other video on there uses the technique, mainly because it does look great watching the world go by in this illusionary sped up form. But this video from Melbourne-based art and design practice ENESS makes innovative use of the technique to animate and showcase the collaborative interactive sculpture MÖBIUS.

The sculpture is made up of 21 triangles that form an optical illusion, so they look like they’re undulating along the ground, when in actuality the different pieces are built to varying heights and switched around to create movement. To help them with animating the sculpture, the group hit the streets of Melbourne to crowdsource the task, asking passersby to place and replace the various triangular shapes. And people were only too happy to help.

In the “making of” video below, ENESS’s Benjamin Ducroz calls the structure a “stop cycle—it’s like an object that sinks into the ground and then returns to the surface.” Whatever that means. To us, it looks a bit like the Loch Ness monster filtered through geometric abstraction, swapping a freshwater Scottish lake for Melbourne’s Federation Square.