Martin Smith’s watch winder, the Solar Orbiter looks as if it had travelled from Thra, the three-sunned world of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal. More precisely, it may have escaped from Aughra’s observatory: all brass spheres, silver discs and improbable arms revolving around a private cosmology. In the film, Aughra’s enormous orrery predicts the Great Conjuction of the three suns. Smith’s machine marks a more local astronomical event: the 15th anniversary of MB&F’s M.A.D. Gallery, or 15 journeys around our own sun.
This all belongs naturally in Maximilian Büsser’s universe. MB&F’s machines have long been fuelled by the founder’s memories of Star Wars, Grendizer, spacecraft and the optimistic science fiction of his childhood. He has written of growing up at a time when the difference between science fiction and science fact appeared to be a question of when, rather than if.
Two fantastic mechanical cosmologies from the imagination of two genius, almost 50 years apart: Martin Smith’s Solar Orbiter for MB&F (2026)and Jim Henson’s Aughra’s orrery from The Dark Crystal (1982).
Smith, one of the M.A.D.Gallery’s earliest artists through Laikingland, received a brief to create a kinetic work for the anniversary. He began with 15 wheels. Engineering, refusing the symbolism, demanded a few more. When Büsser saw the design, he asked whether it could wind a watch. Thus a poetic machine acquired a job.
Standing 60cm high, it uses around 300 handmade components in steel, aluminium, brass and carved wood. A watch rotates silently at one end, with adjustable winding speeds, while the upper mechanism conducts its own eccentric solar ballet. Interchangeable heart, hand and star elements quote Smith’s earlier works, allowing the machine to carry its own history within it.
Martin Smith’s Solar Orbiter for MB&F and Charles and Ray Eames’s 1957 Solar Do-Nothing Machine, its gloriously purposeless spiritual ancestor.
Its other acknowledged ancestor is Charles and Ray Eames’s Solar Do-Nothing Machine, made in 1957 for Alcoa. That bright aluminium toy converted sunlight into movement and had no intended output beyond delight. The Solar Orbiter is its slightly more responsible descendant: it performs one useful task, then expends extraordinary imagination making that task wonderfully excessive.
The M.A.D.Gallery itself began with a similar mixture of conviction and improvisation. When its first customer appeared, the team had no card machine and had to ask for cash. Fifteen years later, mechanical art has become a watch accessory without surrendering any of its strangeness. Somewhere between Aughra’s observatory and an Eames experiment, the Solar Orbiter gives a resting watch its own peculiar cosmos.
Limited to ten pieces. CHF9,900 + taxes.
Author: Julia Pasarón
Discover other fabulous machines by MB&F and M.A.D. Gallery presented this year, such as MB&F’s robot watch, the HM12 The Guardian and Frank Buchwald’s ML15 Helios
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