Can we get different view of the object? A shot of the inside would be great but even juswt one from another side might help.
If it’s metal, and only an artwork, how on earth would that break have happened? Wouldn’t it have to be extremely cold to break in that manner? Or else it’s painted plastic.
I’m starting to think model space station. Ask the Drama dept - did they have a sci fi play of some sort?
I don’t think a theater production would be that fussy about a prop (the seams and bolts would just be painted on) but a film production might, especially if it needed to interact with other models.
I was at my brother’s last night and I spotted this Doctor Who toy in his basement. The Sontaran Space Ship.
You’re welcome!
Cast aluminum can be pretty brittle. I’ve seen cast-aluminum parts break like that. Someone could have dropped something on the object, or bumped it up against something while moving it, and smashed that hole in.
The shape of the hole looks like it could have rusted through, except there’s no visible corrosion anywhere else on the surface. And most plastics would either leave bent bits on the edge of the hole, or would have a more shatter-like break pattern, with the outline of the hole being polygonal.
On the other hand (assuming a functional purpose, not just art), that hole might provide a clue to the modular construction. Maybe whatever was in there had a tendency to pit through at spots, and the idea was that if a hole wore through, you could just replace the small damaged section, rather than replacing a huge octant slab or the like.
When next you have an opportunity for pictures, I’d like to see a close-up of the polar cap. In particular, I can’t tell if the grid rises above the sphere surface there, or if the underlying sphere is peaked like that, too.
Former theater set designer here. Set pieces are seen for far away and are generally impressionistic in nature. If it was a set design the bolts would have most likely been painted on. I’ve worked on quite a few high end productions and have never seen anywhere near this level of detail in/on a set piece.
Art piece sounds plausible but casting that many pieces and having them fit seems beyond the ability of most artists (judging by my own abilities anyway).
Well, if you went to art school, you’d know that creative people occasionally get excited telling people about their work–particularly a crowd of people unused to hearing about the intensity and specificity and punctiliousness involved.
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P.S. Can we all just agree that there are many types and personalities of artists and they are all as likely, more or less, to do just about anything you could mention as any other group of individuals? 
Or hamsters…
That sounds closer to me - my guess is that it really is some sort of casting sphere (whether for spherical concrete bollards or not) - if you can get close, perhsp there are . If it was a crappy prototype (perhaps because it was made of lots of separate parts), that might explain why it’s been left to (not) corrode for years.
Separately, if it really is about 3 feet in diameter, that would make the blocks in the background wall pretty large - 2’ x 4’. Is that really the case, or are you hoaxing us all with an object that’s actually only about 3 inches in diameter?
Of course, we’ve all assumed that it’s basically smooth on the inside - what if it was used to cast something like a giant golf ball, covered with dimples? If that’s the case, you’d need it in lots of sections, since each section would have an interior ‘projection’, which would need to be separated individually…
Art.
If it’s that small then the bolts are objects of wonder. You’d need a microscope to put them on!
I could see how the pipes on the side might actually be conduits for hoses and wires (for sensors). That might explain the modular construction, to allow access to what is inside. There might have been some sort of material injector in the tube we we see leading in/out of the side. I could maybe imagine it being a physics labs’ attempt at a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor.
The Doctor in that pic looks like the Sontaran just ripped his dick off.
The second photo should show the scale more clearly. It’s really about 3+ feet across. The blocks in the background are stacked across the back of an open shed and look like they might have been parking control or traffic guidance blocks - they are very big.
It’s a salvage yard. What can I say?
Oh God yes. Artists are also craftspeople. I can tell I’m talking to an artist when they look at one of my extremely painstaking works (handbuilt clay sculpture in this case) and instead of saying oh wow, how cool, they say, it must have been a bitch getting the oxide stain wiped out down in those cracks, what did you use?
/thread hijack
It is the right shape for a vacuum chamber, but impossible to seal with that insane number of joints. Also, as many bolts as there are, it isn’t near enough to seal the thing even with fairly soft gasketing.
I think I have enough experience with such things to say that it was probably never even water tight, though it might hold some sort of viscous liquid, like concrete as has been suggested.
The piping seems to be custom made, and again with all the joints. Who makes pipes with lengthwise flanging?
Really, I agree with those who think it is a mold. That is the only reason I can think of to make the piping in that way. It could be for rotational molding of plastic. What needs a round plastic tank with seamlessly joined piping like that? Could it be for molding globes? That would explain why the seams are done that crazy way…but why the pipes then?
It would require a lot fewer patterns to have the pieces like a soccer ball or geodesic dome, but there might be mundane explanations for why it is done with longitude and latitude: Maybe the designer was just stupid. Maybe the CAD software could do it this way the easiest. Maybe the foundry could only handle castings of a certain size. Maybe it was designed by an arrogant PhD who assumed engineers were stupid because he couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell him.