wind

Showing 16 posts tagged wind

The New York Times’ video profile of Max Mulhern’s “Aqua Dice” shows how the artist’s love for the sea and his interest in unknown outcomes came together into one project.

Fate adrift, these two giant sea dice were constructed out of plywood, pine, PVC and epoxy. Technically illegal — “you’re not allowed to put an object on the water that’s unattended, and you’re not allowed to go to sea if there’s not a constant watch on-board,” explains Mulhern, — they are designed to collapse on impact so as not to be a danger to any other vessels, and are brightly painted. They also have GPS in both of them, customized by technology students, to track where ocean currents are taking the dice and how far apart they are from each other.

“I’ve spoken to a lot of ocean scientists and they’re thinking that the dice will separate quickly,” he said. “What I like about that is the dual possibilities: there’s one throw and two outcomes, two possible destinations — and destinies.”

Whether you love art, love sailing or love the unknown, you can track the dice (and even bet as to where they’ll eventually land) on Mulhern’s site, on this map, or follow the journey on Facebook.

via Visual News.

Sesame Street explains the hurricane to kids in an episode originally created for Hurricane Katrina and set to air again this weekend in the aftermath of Sandy.

Sesame Street - Hurricane Part 1, via explore-blog. To watch the rest of the episode visit, SesameStreet.org.

If you or your kids would like to help people who are still feeling the effects of Hurricane Sandy (or for any reason), there are many things you can do:

Hold a bake sale, wash cars and bikes, offer to rake the neighbors’ leaves, make holiday cards and sell them, or collect sponsors to pledge money for a walk/run/bike/skate/bowl/sled/etc-a-thon. Any of these activities are great ways to raise money for The Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, the Humane Society, City Harvest, or Citymeals-on-Wheels, an organization that prepares and delivers meals to elderly New Yorkers. Donors Choose also has a special page to help teachers and classrooms effected by the hurricane: donorschoose.org/hurricane-sandy.

If you’re in the New York City/New Jersey area and would like to volunteer, visit NYCService.org, or search Volunteer Match for opportunities to help a wide variety of causes all across the country.

On older buildings, it’s not too uncommon to see the crowning touch of an ornamental weather vane — a rotation device which indicates the wind’s direction. But what happens when a bunch of weather vanes are put together on the same surface? That’s the question that American artist Charles Sowers answers with Windswept, a kinetic installation of 612 aluminium weather vanes placed on the facade of San Francisco’s Randall Museum — and revealing surprising results, as you can see in this video from Dezeen.

As you can see, the spinning blades don’t uniformly point in the same direction as one might expect, but rather show smaller diverse patterns and paths of the breeze. Says Sowers: ”Windswept seeks to transform a mundane and uninspired architectural façade (the blank wall of the theatre) into a large scale aesthetic/scientific instrument, to reveal information about the interaction between the site and the wind.”

From Treehugger. Thanks, @mamagotcha.

More kinetic sculptures and more wind in the archives.

The Old Mill, a Walt Disney Silly Symphonies cartoon from 1937.

Like many of the later Silly Symphonies, The Old Mill was a testing-ground for advanced animation techniques. Marking the first use of Disney’s multiplane camera, the film also incorporates realistic depictions of animal behavior, complex lighting and color effects, depictions of rain, wind, lightning, ripples, splashes and reflections, three-dimensional rotation of detailed objects, and the use of timing to produce specific dramatic and emotional effects. All of the lessons learned from making The Old Mill would subsequently be incorporated into Disney’s feature-length animated films, especially 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.