Photograph by Angela Boatwright
"We're a sensationalism service," says Brent Bushnell.
Ask cofounder Adam Sadowsky and he says, "We're a one-stop production company: We make physical art that moves people."
"We want to be the 'engineering is cool' group," Bushnell adds.
Another cofounder, Eric Gradman, sums it up this way: "We're a glorified drinking club with an art problem."
Syyn Labs, the art collective/budding company that Bushnell, Sadowsky, Gradman, and four others founded last year at Barbara's bar at the Brewery Art Colony in Los Angeles, is all that and more. It's the best of what happens when a bunch of nerds, including a physicist and a psychology PhD, get together to obsessively create something mind-blowing simply because they love the challenge.
Syyn's first official project was to help build the complex series of chain reactions that performed simple tasks -- known as a Rube Goldberg machine after the legendary cartoonist who devised the concept -- at the heart of indie rock band OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" video. After it became a viral hit in the spring of 2010 (20 million views and counting on YouTube. Check it out -- again. I'll wait), corporate America came calling. Everyone from Google to Sears has tapped Syyn to build something that inspires wonder, gets their brand noticed, and is infused with the kind of unbridled joy that tends to get squashed out at most companies.
Syyn is discovering that the playfulness game can be a tough racket. Most clients just want what worked for the last guy, and Sadowsky, Syyn's president and sole full-time employee, insists, "We're not a Rube Goldberg company." These guys can make a car-battery commercial beguiling, but it may take some beer and an all-nighter in the desert to do it. And clients like Sears ... well, that's not how Craftsman tools get made. Can these nerds transform their art collaborative into a true business without losing its mischievous, anarchic spirit? It would be their most audacious project yet.
Syyn is itself the embodiment of a Rube Goldberg machine: an eclectic cast of characters, featuring seven founders and some 50 volunteers, ages 24 to 40, whose assembled talents cause a domino effect of creativity. "I have a hard time categorizing them," says Cristin Frodella, a senior product-marketing manager at Google who hired Syyn to build a machine to publicize its global online science fair, which was set to launch in January. "They're fun, smart, geeky, and really plugged-in." Gradman, who at times sports a red Mohawk, is a fire-juggling circus performer, rock musician, semiprofessional whistler, and software engineer. Bushnell is a video-game developer, serial entrepreneur, and Silicon Valley royalty (he's the son of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell). Heather Knight, the only woman among the dozen or so regulars, has worked at both the MIT Media Lab and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and is earning a PhD in robotics at Carnegie Mellon while simultaneously starting Marilyn Monrobot Labs, a robot theater company. "It was cool and all, making things for space," Knight says, "but I was looking for a creative outlet."
OK Go front man Damian Kulash set the Syyn machine in motion. The band, already known for imaginative productions such as its dancing-on-treadmills hit in 2006, thought a music video featuring a Rube Goldberg machine would be captivating. They just needed someone to build it. In late 2008, Kulash, through his nerd circles, posted the project on the online discussion boards for Mindshare L.A., a monthly gathering of art and tech hipsters run by Syyn cofounder and designer Doug Campbell. (Think TED with booze and a great DJ.) The Syyn members, who banded together after meeting at Mindshare, applied for the OK Go project because it sounded like fun.
"They definitely had the right mix of talents," Kulash says. Despite their inexperience -- this was Syyn's first time working together and its first Rube Goldberg machine -- Kulash chose them because "I thought having a large group of people would provide different ideas that would help the machine feel more musical." Syyn was also willing to work for "low dough" over six months, and like Kulash, they were creative workaholics. A revolving group of staff and volunteers pitched in when available, creating a sense of chaos. "The project was a wild, untamed beast," says Kulash, who served as artistic director. Many of the components required dozens of iterations before they worked and looked film-worthy. "We were winging it," says Syyn's Hector Alvarez, a founder and a former ad agency art director. "We spent months learning the physics." The finished product -- 89 specific interactions, from tumbling dominoes to raining umbrellas and a TV-smashing sledgehammer, all in sync with the music -- took 85 takes to execute in a single shot.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Copyright © 2012 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved. Fast Company, 7 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007-2195
Email
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
StumbleUpon
Digg
