In 1934, New York’s Museum of Modern Art opened their famous Machine Art exhibition, featuring industrial objects like gears, bearings, and propellers displayed solely for their aesthetic value. The embedded video is excerpted from avant-garde U.S. filmmaker Ralph Steiner’s Mechanical Principles, which was released only a year earlier, and is very much in the same spirit. If Machine Art was about appreciating machines as sculpture, Mechanical Principles was about appreciating their movements as dance. It’s hypnotic to watch, and quite lovely. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]

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