The crowd hushed. Within seconds, a navy blue river cascaded into a turbine-powered windmill, then detonated in a burst of hundreds of brightly colored dominos. It was just one epic element at the eighth Tech Topple held Saturday at San Jose’s Tech Interactive museum.
A team of professional builders led by kinetic artist Alex Huang — YouTube fans and “Domino Masters” enthusiasts know him as Flash Domino — put their kinetic energy skills to the test to create the largest-ever domino and machine city. Built from more than 17,000 plastic pieces, Topple Town, USA recreated an urban aesthetic mixed with a serene landscape, complete with tiny parks, a lake, a river, a snowy mountain, houses and dominoes creating the vision of fireworks shooting up into the air.
As the 54-hour buildup came to an explosive close, dominos collapsing against each other and other props in a massive and impressively creative chain reaction, the crowd erupted in oohs and aahs. Huang, the 23-year-old domino guru from San Jose, stood on a 6-foot-tall ladder, pumping his left fist into the air.
After pulling off the amazing feat, he said: “It’s overwhelming. This is the exactly the result that we wanted. I’m very happy. Ecstatic.” As he prepped for the event on Thursday, he also explained, “All we’re doing here is trying to tell a story.”
Huang is a prominent member of the domino and machine build community. He was just 16 when he launched San Jose’s first Tech Topple in 2016. Last year, he produced the reality show “Domino Masters” for Fox and Hulu. Although he’s done freelance projects for Pizza Hut, Disney and the Golden State Warriors, he looks forward to Tech Topple every year because it offers a rare opportunity for him to work with famed builders in the community.
Seven builders joined Huang last week at the Tech Interactive to construct the miniature city. Among them were professional chain reaction artist Lyle Broughton and former domino world record holder Erez Klein. They first met Huang on the set of “Domino Masters,” which Broughton went on to win. Klein was a 22-year-old college student when he captured the world record for toppling 255,389 dominos in 1980.
“The logistics are actually the hardest part,” Klein said, not the painstaking hours it takes to arrange the finger-sized pieces. The satisfaction comes from the creative elements of building.
Broughton and Huang share similar viewpoints on their work. The topple is not so much an engineering feat, but an artistic one, and they’re eager to demonstrate.
Today’s aerodynamic plastic dominos, combined with Youtube tutorials, have pushed the technological capabilities of the art form further away from simple record-breaking.
For Flash Domino and the rest of the team, the challenge resides in creating something beautiful rather than technically impressive. What’s important is building elements of a larger narrative, with moments of tension, relief, humor and drama.
“The question of ‘will it work?’ has been solved,” Broughton said days before the topple. “So the questions we are interested in answering are: How do we make something that’s visually interesting that hasn’t been done before? How do we do something that tells a story in an interesting way?’ Those are all artistic questions.”
As a chain reaction of landscape and city lights ignited Saturday, it painted a toppled adventure one piece at a time.
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