Google Logo Honors Mobile Inventor Alexander Calder

Frank Watson, July 22, 2011

If you’re wondering what the logo is on Google today, it's a mobile – perhaps you have memories of one hanging above your crib, or maybe even one hanging above your own child’s crib. Alexander Calder, born 113 years ago today in 1898, may not have invented the baby mobile, but his large sculptures, dubbed mobile art because of the use of moving parts and wires, were the inspiration for the genre.

The doodle is clever – it moves when you mouse around it – and there is a spot where it almost disappears. The shadow below the search box moves in synch, too.

The art appears to be 3D, and the creativity to make this work can be seen in the large amount of code Google has on the page. If you check the page source, there is so much more code than an ordinary Google homepage.

Calder would have loved the work that went in to this doodle. The mobile has the fish motif that Calder was known for, and that childish feel that the artist and toy creator enjoyed.

Calder is from a family of American artists. His father was a famous sculptor – as was his grandfather, who sculpted the William Penn statute that sits above Philadelphia's City Hall – and his mother was a professional portrait painter trained in France at the Sorbonne.

"In the 1950s, Calder increasingly concentrated his efforts on producing monumental sculptures. Notable examples are ".125" for JFK Airport in 1957, "La Spirale" for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and "Man" ("L'Homme"), commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal. Calder's largest sculpture until that time, 20.5 meters high, was "El Sol Rojo," constructed for the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City," Wikipedia notes.

His mobiles are exhibited in some of the best known museums of the world. There is a room set aside in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Calder, who died November 11, 1976, was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

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Google Logo Today 22 July 2011 | Google Logo Alexander Calder 22.07.2011 | Google Logo | Google Doodle

Looks like Google is playing with my its users again — only this time, the Doodle is very tricky.

Compared to previous Google Doodles that you can easily click the image and see the search words embedded into it, the new Google logo today, July 21, is a moving image, and deciphering it is not an easy task. Luckily, I decoded the new Google Logo and found the answer hiding inside it.

The new Google Doodle is for Alexander Calder, the American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing the mobile sculpture — so yeah, the logo today is the “mobile sculpture” that Calder invented 80 years ago. Tomorrow is Alexander Calder’s 113th birthday.

According to Calder’s Wikipedia entry, he also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects, but his mobile sculpture is his winning moment because it’s an art with a sprinkle of Physics. The Mobile Sculpture is an artwork that is using the principle of equilibrium that is allowing weighted objects hang. Objects that are in the sculpture are balancing each other to maintain their horizontal alignment.

To simplify the explanation of the Mobile Sculpture, see it as a see-saw with two or three kids playing with it. The kids are the rods, and the see-saw is the main object of the equilibrium or balance, and kids can control their weight and their place or position to maintain the horizontal or straight alignment of the see-saw.

I embedded a video from YouTube featuring Alexander Calder’s mobile in his father’s hometown in Philadelphia.

So apparently, Google loves technology and science — and they celebrate them by using Art.

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