Point Cloud

source: fantasticocotidiano

Point Cloud de James Leng es una escultura hecha con alambre delgado que se mueve siguiendo datos meteorológicos desde 8 servidores diferentes, todo controlado vía Arduino.
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source: metalabharvardedu

Have a look at the enigmatic Point Cloud, described by its creator James Leng as “an attempt to reimagine our daily interaction with weather data.” Leng, who was a student in the metaLAB-affiliated GSD course Mixed-Reality City this past Spring, observes that weather 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”—

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…. 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.

To offer a critical response to this discrepancy, Leng shaped a project for the Mixed-Reality City class that re-materializes the weather, rendering its shifting effects both physically apprehensible and refreshingly strange. In material terms, Leng took 300 feet of wire and knit it into a nebulous network with some 966 painstakingly glued-together connectors; servos with specially-designed cams transmit weather data (via Arduino) to the framework, translating linear inputs into shifting, generative undulations. In place of the sentiment and sensationalism of the Weather Channel or the landscape painter’s sublime, Leng offers an uncanny concatenation—fragile and insubstantial, and yet somehow formidable.
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source:

Point Cloud, a kinetic sculpture by the designer James Leng, takes weather data from the web and expresses it in the form of a moving, shifting wire “cloud,” powered by hundreds of super-tiny servos and connectors. Even as the technology we use for predicting the weather has grown more and more complex, Leng writes, our means for displaying what we know have remained laughably simple (think of those little cartoon pictures of the sun or a thundercloud). You can’t use Point Cloud to read the forecast, but it does capture, in a beautiful way, the fact that the weather, cartoon forecasts aside, is what Leng calls “permanently variable.”