With a simple turn of hand, a kinetic event is born. First, a bowling ball travels down a series of zig-zag stairs, is flung back up into a bathtub at 16 feet in the air, and then dropped again, setting off another series of reactions that drops a 2-ton bank safe from 30 feet in the air.
The 25-ton Rube Goldberg-esque contraption of 20 different kinetic sculptures, based on the Hasbro board game “Mousetrap,” is the result of a lifetime of interest in building and over 13 years of dedication to creating a larger-than-life spectacle.
The board game requires the pieces to be assembled in an exact way to “work,” but that didn’t cut it for Mark Perez when he picked it up as a child.
“I used to try to put a couple of games together and see if I could make it work—and hopefully I wouldn’t poke my sister’s eye out,” Perez said. And he turned the plastic crank handle and it worked. Now the crank is “life-sized,” at eye-level, and sets a bowling ball traveling through a series of simple machines, building enough potential energy to crush a car.
This year they’ve built two new structures—a tetherball-like piece where a bowling ball wraps around a pole to set off the bank safe-drop and a new gutter piece—both of which will be making their Bay Area debut this weekend at the Peralta Junction, a popup festival in West Oakland.
“There’s a great art scene in San Francisco,” Perez said on Monday, during the first of the four days that it would take to put together the entire Life-Size Mousetrap.
