Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, people on every part of it can acknowledge that, for one reason or another, the country doesn’t seem to be as unified as it could be. In times of strife, though, is when we must hold onto each other the strongest. Jason Naumoff and AJ White, partners at the bicoastal design firm New Creatures, seem to agree, and they recently created a project that’s symbolic of the peace and collaboration that’s possible in our country: a Rube Goldberg machine that stretches from coast to coast, which they called the Common Ground project.

“Common Ground was basically a collective, collaborative installation experiment that we’ve been thinking about for a couple of years,” Naumoff told Uproxx. “With the election and everything that’s going on in the country right now, it seemed like a really appropriate time to try it.”

Artists from Oakland, Phoenix, Atlanta, Detroit, and New Hampshire worked together on a chain reaction that didn’t physically stretch across the country, but each part did have to set off the next part of the machine in real time, whether that be through a phone call, email, text message, or something otherwise remote.

Did it work? Well, we probably wouldn’t be writing about it if it didn’t, but you can take a look for yourself above, and read more about the project at Uproxx.

Featured image: lucianvenutian