Look what shows up on my tumblr feed… ...

Look what shows up on my tumblr feed…

Point Cloud

Mechanical installation is a wireframe form which adjusts it’s shape according to a weather data feed. Video below:

Point Cloud is an attempt to reimagine our daily interaction with weather data. Weather has always had a unique place in our lives, because it has a multiplicity that encompasses both the concrete and the indeterminate. It is the intangible context within which we build our lives and our cities, but it is also the physical element against which we create protective shelter. Most of the time it is an invisible network that we can see but are not aware of; yet it can manifest in a spectacle or disaster, come forward and activate our senses, make us forget our rationality in delight or fear. With modern scientific and technological developments, we can now deploy sophisticated monitoring devices to document and observe weather. Yet despite these advances, our analysis and understanding of meteorology is still largely approximate, and in many cases, inaccurate. Weather continues surprise us and elude our best attempts to predict, control, and harness the various elements.

In contrast, however, the nuances of weather’s continuously shifting states are largely oversimplified as the information is transmitted into our daily experience. Our various home and mobile devices most likely distill a forecast into static representations, such as numeric values or simple infographics of sun, clouds, or rain. There is a deep discrepancy between the flatness of the visualizations we are accustomed to, and the rich mixture of tactility and perceptibility of our immediate physical experience. As a critical response to these issues, Point Cloud emerges as a sculptural form defined by a thin wire mesh, driven asynchronously by 8 individual servos controlled via Arduino. As whiteness of the hanging structure begins to disappear into the background, the viewer is treated to a constantly morphing swarm of black points dancing through midair.

More at the project’s Vimeo page + Flickr page

(via archidose)

eliason

447 notes