The Pacific Northwest is rainy. Lots of clouds. The Amazon offices are also in the Pacific Northwest—in Seattle, to be exact. Like other giant tech companies, Amazon created a cloud so we can pay them to store data. To celebrate this transition from our “our analog hard copy world and local computer storage” to a “cloud-based system,” multimedia artist Dan Corson has created Nebulous, a public art sculpture of two large, pixelated cloud forms.
Located at Amazon’s Seattle campus, these two “low-res” cloud forms—which are neither fully transparent or opaque—are made of a variety of colored glass, transparent conducting film, aluminum, photovoltaics, LEDs and other electronic components. Switch-glass panels designed via parametric modeling form the skin of the cloud-inspired sculptures.
Nebulous from Dan Corson on Vimeo.
“The sunlight-projected patterns create animated colored shadows on the courtyard below,” Corson notes. “The pulsing patterns at night are created by the animation of the switchglass, not the static white LEDs behind them. The computer controlled switch-glass patterning content plays in a 20-minute loop that switches between static, slower and faster animations.”
“These ‘low-res’ clouds have select glass discs that shift between levels of opacity in a digital dance resembling old school calculating computers or perhaps pulsing lightning within clouds on a stormy night,” he adds.
Nebulous is now visible outside of Amazon’s Seattle campus. Click here to see more of Dan Corson’s work.
