AirColor Stacks - Kinetic Arts

Tim Elverston - Ruth Whiting - WindFire Designs

Overview of AirColor Stacks:

We are super excited about our new prototype. It allows us to add color and motion in the vertical plane and can be scaled up or down easily.

It has taken about two years to perfect the design. The end result is deceptively simple, and has done really well in our testing. It is easy to make something beautiful, but hard to make something that can reliably deploy in a public space—this does both.

Use cases and versatility:

This one uses an abstract painting but it could also be very effective with something more representational.

It is designed in such a way as to allow for quick-changing the painted strips on-site, so the graphics could easily be seasonal or changed for special events! Strips could potentially be made huge, and scaled up to 16 FEET each!

About this prototype: Higher res video here

For this test Ruth painted a large rectangle with an abstracted slice of atmosphere. She imagined air currents and molecules floating around down at ground level and all the way up into the dark of space. We then slit this large vertical rectangle horizontally into 15 fat strips.

The armature of carbon fiber and stainless steel is designed by Tim Elverston. It delicately floats the strips with almost no friction and stacked in order.

The working title is AirColor Stacks. The current prototype uses 15 strips and hangs about 9 feet when fully assembled. This moves with the air.