The handiwork of German product designers and engineers Martin Fussenegger, Michael Haas and Julian Adenauer, the inkjet-with-attitude is capable of precisely firing individual colored dots from up to 20 feet away, creating huge – and surprisingly accurate – murals on whatever wall is unlucky enough to get in the way.
The printer was constructed from a converted paintball system, hooked up to an industrial PC running custom software. Using the touchscreen, images in SVG format can be loaded from a USB drive and overlaid onto a digital photo of the blank wall; that allows the artists to frame the painting exactly. A laser is then used to indicate on the wall exactly where the paintballs will be fired – useful if you discover you’re currently standing where some high-speed Dulux will soon be approaching – before 5-10cm dots are created by the 200km/h colored balls.
Thanks to nifty paint technology the end result can last on the wall for as long as months or as little as a few hours, reacting to UV light to fade away. Meanwhile the paintball shells are made of gelatine and will decompose in rain.
Thanks to Iceland's volcanic ash cloud, we're again obsessed with vapor — clouds, mists, fogs, steam, chemical gas warfare, the miasma theory of disease — in fact, with just about any aerosolized matter like sandstorms, carcinogenic dust clouds of asbestos, crowd control tear gas, climate change smog and forests atomized through slash and burning. One could devote an entire blog just on this topic without running of material, as anything could probably be vaporized, given a thermonuclear bomb or a supernova or apparition lessons at Hogwarts.
If one were indeed to start such a blog (perhaps called Pathological Aerology in imitation of the awesome Pathological Geomorphology), there definitely should be an entry on Juliet Haysom's Spring.
The proposal of which having won the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2007, Spring was permanently installed the following year at Ragley Hall, a stately country house near Stratford-upon-Avon in England.
Quoting Haysom:
Researching my proposal for the Jerwood Sculpture Prize brief, I realized that Ragley Hall is situated above one of England's most significant aquifers. About 40 percent of Severn and Trent Water's supply comes from this vast subterranean water resource, as do the celebrated springs at nearby Malvern, Leamington Spa and Burton on Trent.
Rather than construct and import something into the park, my proposal involved drilling a borehole into the aquifer below the site. Water from the borehole would be then pumped to the surface where it would appear as a cloud of fine mist. Spring's external form and appearance will vary significantly depending on weather and light conditions.
In other words, when early morning sunlight begins hitting the nearby solar panels that power the water pumps, the mist will slowly start to appear. At midday, the cloud will have expanded. When it's sunny, it will create a tower of mist, a sort of shimmering tree. If it's overcast or windy, however, its form will become tenuous, more spectral. If there's a rainstorm, then it will dissolve into the pouring rain.
As evening approaches and the light dims, Spring will dull down until vanishing completely for the night.
Quoting Haysom again:
While at first glance Spring might look like a natural phenomenon, on close inspection the form of its jets and the presence of nearby solar panels will reveal the fact that it is a man-made intervention into the landscape. The parkland at Ragley Hall is similarly deceptive; its rolling hills, informal stands of trees and picturesque lake were, in fact, designed by Capability Brown.
One of the towering figures of landscape architecture thus invoked, and along with him the monumentally rich history and traditions of garden design, it wouldn't be far off the mark to think Spring as a sort of avant-garde folly, a Greek temple vaporized and aerosolized against a sylvan backdrop to evoke the story of Jupiter and Io or the vaporous origins of the Centaurs.
A project I've been meaning to write about ever since seeing it in Vague Terrain #16 is "Pulse Room" by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
[Image: From "Pulse Room" by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer].
"Pulse Room," originally produced back in 2006, was an "interactive installation featuring one to three hundred clear incandescent light bulbs," the brightness of which was controlled by an interface and sensor that could detect "the heart rate of participants."
When someone holds the interface, a computer detects his or her pulse and immediately sets off the closest bulb to flash at the exact rhythm of his or her heart. The moment the interface is released all the lights turn off briefly and the flashing sequence advances by one position down the queue, to the next bulb in the grid. Each time someone touches the interface a heart pattern is recorded and this is sent to the first bulb in the grid, pushing ahead all the existing recordings. At any given time the installation shows the recordings from the most recent participants.
The room thus becomes a counterpunctual archive of heart rates in space, throbbing like a chandelier in front of you.
[Image: From "Pulse Room" by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer].
Lozano-Hemmer later expanded this idea in scale quite significantly for his "Pulse Park" project, in which New York's Madison Square Park was temporarily illuminated by a moving, heart-rate-controlled "matrix of light beams."
But I would like to see something like "Pulse Subway," say, where long tunnels flicker off around underground curves as heartbeat-like rhythms of light beat below ground, scaling the whole thing up yet further to form a piece of urban infrastructure (or is that simply a nightclub?); or even "Pulse Cinema," in which the film itself fades in and flickers out according to the pulmonary ups and downs of the audience. Scenes of high-stress are seamlessly projected, but boring moments make the whole theater drain down toward black. One particularly caffeinated individual keeps the whole place bright as day.
[Image: From "Pulse Room" by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer].
It's less the lighting effects that interest me here, though, than the idea of an archive of heart rates, a place where old rhythms could be stored. You could thus try out someone's pulse—Usain Bolt's record-shattering runs, or someone who's survived a car accident—turning the facility (call it the CardiArchive) into a kind of Brainstorm for heart rates. Adventures in tachycardia. Heart-rate sharing.
Upload new pulses into the light-cloud and experience someone else's panic as your own.
We've already posted about Rafael Lozanno-Hemmer. This project was first realised during Venice Art Biennale I believe and is now quite well known. One of his most interesting project according to me.
Yvette Mattern, From One To Many, 2010 (photos Jonathan Gröger)
Yvette Mattern's stunning laser rainbow projection, From One To Many, blazed through Berlin's night sky over three evenings, enabling any Berliner devoid of a festival pass or even knowledge that the festival ever existed to enjoy the spectacle.
The rainbow rose diagonally from the roof of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, crossed a distance of 3 km and reached to a point approximately 250 metres up the shaft of the Fernsehturm (TV tower) on Alexanderplatz.
Another version of the project was shown a year ago in New York City, under the name Global Rainbow.
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