Sydney Salamy: Looking Outwards-09

I chose to do my blog on the 6th Looking Outwards post of Jenny Lee. The project she did was an installation called “eCloud” built by Aaron Koblin, Nik Hafermaas, and Dan Goods in 2010.

On first glance of the image on Jenny’s post of the installation from below, I decided I already liked it. The way the squares were placed were already pretty on their own. The technological aspect only made it better. I like the concept of incorporating live changes into an art piece. Having these changes be changes in weather, and having the sculpture look like a cloud were really cool ideas. One of my LO posts had a similar idea of incorporating live weather changes, but with music, so I was already inclined towards liking the piece. The squares turning opaque was visually interesting as well. I’m used to seeing stuff change color, but changing clarity was different and I’m very curious to know how it works.

There isn’t much to really disagree with within her post. Most of the things she states are just factual information. The one thing I would critique is the explanation about what the pattern is displaying. She states the piece “transforms the patterns of the tiles to create the “cloud” in the accurate shape of one in particular time zone.” However, what I got from the video was that the patterns weren’t changing so much to emulate the shape but more the weather. So if it was raining hard, the tiles changed in a way that made the piece look like rain, like little squares falling to the ground. It seemed like the speed of the “falling” would also change speed based on how hard it was storming.

Maybe a way to improve the report would be to mention specifically how the piece changes in response to the different types of weather. In the picture I posted, it seemed like the cloud also changed color as well, since some parts are blue, which isn’t shown in the video. She might want to dive into how things like temperature, wind speeds, precipitation, snow, rain, etc… affect opaqueness, what squares are being changed, what speed they’re being changed at, what color the squares are, what areas of the piece is colored or not, etc…