Rube Goldberg Machines

My decision to make a moving kinetic sculpture for my final piece lead me to researching Rube Goldberg Machines. A Rube Goldberg machine is a device which does a simple action in an overly complex and overly engineered way. Rube Goldberg Machines can be contraptions, device, apparatus or sculpture and the term has become used as an idiom to describe something that is purposely convoluted. Most of the times these machine use a chain reaction where one motion sets over a series of other to indirectly cause the end result. The origin of the term and of the type of machine comes from American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who drew images of complex machines which did simple tasks, they were amusing and on occasion made political comments. Across the pond in England we have Heath Robinson, he also drew complex and fantastical machines which predated Goldberg's, To describe something as ‘Heath Robinson’ suggest a repair or piece of machinery which was created using ingenuity and whatever was to hand.  Now how exactly this relates to my project is to me obvious, art works and sculpture opposes pure functionality, so a device which is unnecessarily complicated for the purpose of intrigue is evidently a piece of art. I want my final piece to explore the link between art and function so a work of art which has a convoluted function would be effective.