New Scientist reports that “Ian Edmonds, an environmental consultant with Solartran in Brisbane, Australia, has designed a giant engine with a balloon as its 'piston'. A greenhouse traps solar energy, providing hot air to fill the balloon. As the balloon rises, it pulls a tether, which turns a generator on the ground. Once the balloon has reached 3 kilometres, air is released through its vent and it loses buoyancy. This means less energy is needed to pull the balloon back down again, resulting in a net power gain.”
For those merely interested in hard numbers, calculations show that “a large 44-metre-diameter recreational balloon could generate 50 kilowatts, enough to supply energy to about 10 homes.”
For us, we want to see some fantastic, unrepentantly beguiling images showing vast tracts of land (or the ocean) planted with boldly colored balloons bobbing up and down, a strange buoyant forest unfurling and retreating during the day, fully resting at night.
Taking cues from Ken Smith and Kathryn Gustafson, urban parks everywhere will have their own aerial installations, generating power for the park itself, if not for the surrounding neighborhood.
Or in the urban periphery of foreclosed suburbs, now bulldozed and eradicated, re-purposed as energy fields, electrifying cities and hopefully not tragically impeding bird migrations.
Experimental energy: la suite.
Il faudrait donc ajouter un ballon de 44m de diamètre à côté de Perpetual (Tropical) SUNSHINE (si il est prêt à avaler les harmoniques)) !
Two data sculptures that focus on representing the varying mood of online friends. The first piece, called the Weeping Willow: a Tree Full of Friends [martinluge.com], consists of a tree-like form with wooden moving branches. Every branch stands for an online friend, and the slope of a single branch represents their happiness or sadness: the happier the friend, the higher the branch will grow. Each branch is made of different segments. The alignment of the segments depend on a numerical value assigned to different adjectives, ranging from 0 to 10, for sad and excited respectively.
In an interesting twist, a new segment is recorded for every day of a week. At the end of the week, the tree is laser-cut and send to the recipient.
The other piece, titled Rose of Jericho: a Living Data Sculpture, is a flower normally growing in deserts, able to survive very long times without water. When watered, the branches rapidly spread out. The process of curling up and opening is reversible and can be repeated many times. Accordingly, the water supply for the rose is controlled by a friend's mood. Happier or more wholesome state results in plenty of water for the plant, and sadness curbs the water supply all together.
These data sculptures attempt to maintain ambiguity and ambivalence: one should not directly be able to read its meaning directly, but instead the focus is on conveying more general feeling of a friend's mood.
Dans la lignée des objets génératifs produits à partir de données collectées sur les réseaux: celui-ci s'appuie sur son réseau d'amis et leur état d'esprit. Une sorte d'arbre décoratif actualisé chaque semaine et qui traduit un certain nombre d'informations. Il y a une dimension de "contact" et de présence à travers l'"arbre" (par exemple, le fait de constater que la branche d'un ami descend nous pousserait peut-être à l'appeler et lui proposer une sortie ou un repas?) qui dépasse l'aspect souvent purement formel du design génératif.
Photographer Blake Gordon has been documenting the geometric effects of light pollution in Austin, Texas, capturing thinly defined shapes in the clouds, projected upward from the tops of buildings.
It's an accidental ornamentation of the city sky – or what Gordon calls Cloud Projections.
"I captured defined patterns of light above the city when atmospheric conditions were right," he explained in an email. This is part of a larger interest in seeing "the clouds as a surface." For instance, Gordon mentioned that he had also produced "rough images from a plane flight in Minnesota where I saw the reverse: low winter clouds gave light pollution a medium to mark upon, and towns broadcast their cluster signals to those above."
About these "broadcasts," Gordon asks: "Some of them were so precise that it's hard to conceive that they are just afterthoughts of a lighting design. Would it still be called light pollution?"
While I'm instantly reminded of Paul Virilio's War and Cinema – where Virilio memorably describes the Nazi use of searchlights as a form of temporary light-architecture, creating a "space" of monumental vaults and upward-projected walls to help define their night rallies – I'm also struck by at least two possibilities here:
1) Airplanes could project downward onto the cloud canopy, showing anything from television shows to the latest Hollywood blockbuster to local weather and temperature information. The audience? The people in that particular aircraft. Like some strange technological implementation of Jacques Lacan, you'd be moving forward into a world defined by your own projections. Imagine, though, looking out across the city at other airplanes stuck in holding patterns, projecting films down onto the clouds of their respective flight paths. You glimpse scenes from The Dark Knight, Valkyrie, and The Wrestler. Or perhaps planes could project images in all directions, forming cylinders of imagery. An IMAX of the sky. Whenever you encounter clouds, your flight crew switches on the outside projectors... and everyone gazes out at that ghostly presence, a dream-cloud of film passing hundreds of miles per hour through the inner atmosphere.
2) Buildings could project films upward onto the cloud canopy. For your next corporate party you hire SkyTV: a patented, cinematic approach to urban cloud cover. Drive-in cinemas would no longer exist; high-rises would, instead, have installed bleachers on their roofs, like those old tiered seats you find atop housesnear Wrigley Field, put there so you can see the game without an official ticket. Only, here, those bleachers are tilted back like planetarium seats – and everyone is watching the sky.
a) Even without shining films into the sky, this would be an amazing idea: turning the whole city into a planetarium. Perhaps astronomers should be asking: Why aren't there sky-bleachers on every roof? You're out on a date some night and you're invited to stop by a friend's party – but everyone seems to be heading up onto the roof. You both follow, drinks in hand – and soon you're out on the roofscape, nervous amidst bleachers, gigantic hulking silhouettes against the night sky. And there are dozens and dozens of people up there, reclined in near-silence, watching the constellations. There are thousands of buildings around the city like this, you're told. No one stays inside anymore.
b) Perhaps it's time to rethink movie theater design. Perhaps the coolest architecture studio you could take right now would be one in which you rethink the contemporary cinema. Perhaps the outdoor cinemas of the future use clouds as their surface, and rooftops as their arena. AMC might even offer corporate sponsorship. From GPSFILM to CINEMA41, ideas for redesigning the cinematic experience are already out there – so how might they be tweaked to involve the sky?
c) It's the summer of 2011 – a Friday night – and you're out for drinks in Manhattan with friends. But then all the lights in midtown begin to switch off, and weird glowing shapes appear in the sky. There are noises. You think it's some kind of cheesy night club opening up downtown, or perhaps the Mayan apocalypse a year early. But then: Ghostbusters III, projected from some kind of mega-projector, appears above you in the clouds. It's the world's most talked-about film premiere: ghosts in the sky and a million unticketed viewers, in a kind of vertical philanthropy of the moving image.
3) Like something out of Archigram, you develop a stationary airship that passes up through the clouds each night to project films back down; for the audience below, it's as if a talking hologram has settled into the sky above the city. The people who control the ship are dream technicians. But then the airship is hijacked by a 15-year old, who flies it above remote stretches of the Amazon, terrifying uncontacted native tribes. Steven Spielberg soon makes a movie about him, produced by Werner Herzog.
4) BLDGBLOG here proposes FogFilms, a new project for my fellow San Franciscans. When the fog gets bad, the films get going.™ We'll transform fog banks into film screens.
In any case, it seems worth asking if we could transform light pollution from its current status as a kind of abstract blur, somewhere between orange and white, into something worth watching – if we could focus it, concentrate it, or, more accurately, give it content.
After all, there would seem to be serious architectural possibilities here. On foggy nights, or humid nights, or cloudy nights, you transform the sky into a trompe l'oeil painting, a cinematic oculus, a new ceiling, a kind of dream-valve above the city.
Pas tout à fait d'accord avec les propositions faites par Geoff Manaugh (BLDBLOG) --après tout, les projections dans le "fog" datent (au minimum) du milieu des années 70 et du fameux "Line defining a cone" d'Anthony Mc Call! puis ont été popularisées par Michael Jackson himself dans ses clips avant d'être expérimentées par tout le monde en club ou concert! ... Et je pense que ce ne serait pas très intéressant d'être confronté à un "tv-sky" (ou même des projections de films). Il y aurait bien sûr par contre des projets spécifiques à développer. En ce sens, le travail de Lozano-Hemmer est probablement plus intéressant ou donne une piste plus architecturale pour des projections volumiques.
Le travail du photographe Blake Gordon (Cloud Projections), qui documente une sorte de "cité hantée", tout en ombres et lumières est par contre intéressant.
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