OK Go is the band that made that hilarious treadmill video a few years ago. Their frontman Damian Kulash has issued tiny mission statements here and there: “We’re trying to be a DIY band in a post-major label world” …and the essential: “Our whole bag is having good ideas and making cool shit.”

Their new video is nothing but brilliant and silly ideas, one after another, so good, I wish I could watch it in slow motion (watching it without any sound is a whole other experience). It was designed and built by Syyn Labs who describe the amazing constraints they had to work under on their website. They call it “Rube Goldberg Machine”. It’s an homage to the work of Rube Goldberg, after whom an adjective was named; he was a cartoonist known for his wildly-elaborate inventions designed to accomplish some simple task, like this “Simplified Pencil Sharpener”:

For Goldberg, machines were “a symbol of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results.”

It makes us think about all the ways we do things the hard way, and wonder if there’s a more direct path to where we want to go…

…but then we realize that all those switchbacks and seemingly circuitous routes often lead us to learn what we need to, to unexpected revelations and meet-ups, and places we were meant to be that we never imagined…

Via Boing Boing