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Design

Artist Turns Ball Pit Into An Insane Mechanical Playground

Niklas Roy's newest installation features ten thousand flexible yellow balls rocketed through a maze of pneumatic tubing.

Over the past few years, we've written a lot about Niklas Roy. The work of the German artist, and so-called "inventor of useless things" has become something of a fixture on our site, so it's with great pleasure that we bring you the newest in innocuous ingenuity.

Suck the Balls! The aptly-titled pneumatic playground Roy has designed for the Goethe Institute, Krakow, makes us yearn back to our childhoods. Featuring a massive ball pit surrounded by 80 meters of pneumatic tubing, it's exactly the right kind of useless that produces the sort of documentation video you'll remember for the rest of your day:

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From Roy's website:

The installation consists of a ball pit and an 80 meters long pneumatic tube transport, which fills up the entire historic staircase of the Potocki Palace in Kraków. When entering the ball pit, the cabin’s lights switch on and the ball suction action starts! The visitor can operate the peculiar machinery with a suction spout. When sucking the balls which are surrounding his feet, the balls race through the transparent pipe system, creating a visually stunning scene. The journey of the little balls ends in a container above the ball pit, waiting for the climax of the operation: When the visitor pulls the release handle of the container, a fountain of balls splashes down onto his head in a joyful shower.

A helmet is provided to keep the hairstyle in excellent condition throughout the whole experience.

Below, Roy's accomplice, Günter Schulz, beta tests Suck the Balls!

Makes us wish we were in Poland. But for those lucky enough to be on the "Europe" side of the pond, Suck the Balls! will be available to enjoy through December. Below, images of the installation and the tech that makes it happen, alongside GIFs of Suck the Balls! in action. [GIFs via Prosthetic Knowledge]

Enjoy more sparks of useless imagination from Niklas Roy on his website, and check out Suck the Balls! at Goethe Institute, Krakow, through December 2014.