Minneapolis man raises $2M on Kickstarter to make kinetic art for your living room

A little steel ball rolls silently across a sand-covered surface, moved by an unseen force, its path ceaselessly tracing an intricate design.

That idea garnered nearly $2 million on Kickstarter, and all because a Minneapolis doctor decided to quit medicine and put his mind to something serious: making kinetic art using computer-controlled motion devices.

In more than two decades of creating, Bruce Shapiro, 60, of Minneapolis has made large-scale moving art pieces that have been installed in science museums around the world. His robotic creations have appeared at the White House and on Martha Stewart's TV show.

But his latest project is meant for your living room: a glass-topped coffee table called Sisyphus. Shapiro's kinetic art table features a magnet-driven ball autonomously rolling over a layer of sand, "forever creating and erasing beautiful patterns."

It's a little like the precise ridges of sand artfully raked into a miniature Zen garden, only the patterns are created by a silent, tireless little robot gardener toiling on a table next to your couch.

When Shapiro put the idea out on Kickstarter last September, he set a goal of raising $50,000 in 30 days to fund production. He reached his goal in the first 24 hours, and ultimately got $1.92 million from backers as far away as Australia and Thailand who put their money down to be the first to get the tables, which cost $645 to $7,500 each.

The project is a product of Shapiro's lifelong passion for tinkering with electronic gadgets, which continued after he got his medical degree at the University of Minnesota in 1983.

He practiced medicine for about five years, specializing in internal medicine. But he was preoccupied with trying to make stuff from used gear put on the surplus market after being scrapped by Twin Cities area tech companies such as 3M and Honeywell.

"I used to go to auctions and bid on pallet loads of computer drives," he said. "I fell in love with the challenge of controlling a motor with a computer."

Shapiro would force family members and friends to watch demonstrations of how he could use the printer port of his personal computer to control how far a piece of tape stuck on the end of a motor shaft would rotate.

"Pretty much everyone was bored or had a worried look," he said, but it was the beginning of using computer-controlled "stepper" motors for something more than reading floppy disks.

For him, the precise, digitally defined movements of a stepper motor were like pixels in an image. They were tiny, computer-controlled elements that could be put together to make art.

He quit medicine for this?

He gave up medicine in 1991 to tinker with his gadgets, and registered a website, The Art of Motion Control.

His wife, Beverly Trombley, also a doctor, supported him while he became a stay-at-home dad and gadget creator.

His first art robot, EggBot, "was created out of necessity — to convince others I wasn't completely losing my mind," he said.

Invented in 1990, the computer-controlled device can draw a design on an egg or other rounded objects such as Christmas ornaments or miniature pumpkins. It got Shapiro invited to Martha Stewart's TV show in 2010 and to the White House Easter Egg Roll in 2015, where EggBot was programmed to draw the presidential seal on eggs. (The gadget is now a robotics kit that anyone can tinker with. Models starting at $195 are produced by a DIY company called Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.)

Shapiro also created metal sculptures using algorithms and CNC (computer numerical control) to direct etching and cutting tools.

"I kind of fell in love watching the machine," he said. "There's something about seeing the machine moving. There's almost an intelligence behind it."

He created a kinetic sculpture called Ribbon Dancer, installed in science museums in Australia and Iowa, in which a ribbon of silk is spun and twirled in the air by a computer-controlled wand.

Another Shapiro design called Pipedream uses bubbles released by computer-controlled pneumatic solenoids. The bubbles percolate up a wall of clear tubes and create pixel-like images. Museums ranging from the Science of Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul to the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto have versions.

Shapiro has installed large-scale versions of his Sisyphus tables — up to 3 meters in diameter — in museums in Switzerland, Germany and Australia.

But now he's making smaller, glass-covered versions — 2 to 4 feet in diameter — that are intended to be used in the home as a coffee table or an end table. They function as furniture and as art.

Shapiro considers his Sisyphus tables as being like a musical instrument, a sort of high-tech player piano that you just plug in and let autonomously make art.

The different designs or "tracks" traced by the rolling ball in the sand can be arranged and shuffled like songs in an MP3 playlist controlled by a smartphone app. The app can also adjust the speed of the rolling ball and the table's LED lighting.

A composition in sand

So far Shapiro is the only Sisyphus "composer." He's created more than 100 designs, which tend to be geometric, spiral and fractal in nature.

"This is just my style of composition, which is algorithmic," he said.

But he said that anyone can create a design for the device. He hopes that a community of Sisyphus composers will be inspired to make images that will be shared like any other computer file for play on the tables.

The silver ball in a Sisyphus table can trace into the sand any continuous line, he said. "Anything you can draw without picking up your pen."

Zipnosis, a health care IT company, put a Sisyphus table in its guest waiting area in its Minneapolis North Loop location. The table alternates between tracing out geometric designs and the company logo.

"Everyone finds it amazing," said Zipnosis marketing director Art Brown.

A two-motor robot under the table moves the magnet that pulls the ball along its path. Like the Sisyphus legend, the ball is intended to roll 24/7, constantly tracing a new design over the one it just created. Some of the prototypes have been running for thousands of hours continuously, Shapiro said.

(That's why the tables are designed to run silently. It would be annoying if the motors sounded like a laser printer buzzing for hours on end.)

About 1,500 Sisyphus devices were preordered in the Kickstarter campaign.

The metal and wood veneer tables will be assembled starting this spring in a building in northeast Minneapolis that also houses Nordeast Makers, a maker space that Shapiro helped start with Micah Roth, who is the chief operating officer for the Sisyphus project. Trombley is the chief financial officer.

Carol Stephenson, a retired letter carrier and art collector who lives near Atlanta, was the first person to back the Sisyphus project on Kickstarter, with a $705 contribution. She said she plans to park her Sisyphus table next to her recliner, where it will obediently trace out designs while also holding "a very, very good glass of bourbon."

"To me it's just beautiful," she said. "It's like owning the first Apple computer."

Richard Chin • 612-673-1775• @rrchin