Today's Google Doodle Inspired by Trip to MCA

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jul 22, 2011 6:45PM

People go apeshit for Google doodles. Like the guitar motif they designed for Les Paul's birthday. Or the Charlie Chaplin video Google doodle. Or the one from April 1, 2010.

Today's doodle is in honor of artist and sculptor Alexander Calder, who was born on this date in 1898. Calder is recognized as the creator of mobile sculptures, which combines both his interests in wire sculpture and kinetic art.

Google software engineer Jered Wierzbicki writes on the company's blog that he was inspired to create the doodle after a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art last year featuring an exhibit of Calder's mobiles.

Calder took ordinary materials at hand—wire, scraps of sheet metal—and made them into brilliant forms, letting space and motion do the rest. As an engineer, I work with abstractions, too, so this really struck me.

But you kind of want to play with the things. They do not let you do that at museums.

So I coded up a very basic demo of a mobile and showed it to a friend, who showed it to one of our doodlers—and then this amazing thing happened: talented artists and engineers who liked the idea just started to help! What we ended up with is way cooler than anything I could have built on my own.

We concur with Wierzbicki's suggestion to check out the doodle if your computer has an accelerometer. This is your time suck for the day.