Encyclopedia of the Exquisite covers the first parachute (an umbrella contraption launched in Montpellier, France in 1783) and the first hot-air balloon, the ornate aerostatic machine which took off from Versailles as King Louis XVI watched below. Now a Brooklyn kid and his dad have launched their own weather balloon in to the upper stratosphere, [...]
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uk_viH4Unw&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] Besides being incredibly beautiful, this video of a rocket launcher falling from space back into the Earth’s atmosphere takes up several threads running throughout Encyclopedia of the Exquisite: clouds, pioneering air-travel (in hot-air balloons and via the first parachute), silence and minimalist artwork (to my mind, anyway). A rocket booster on the STS-124 shuttle had [...]
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I’m running with a theme here. As a post-script to my recent post on the “History of the Sky” project, I wanted to mention two more airy series of artworks: Yoko Ono’s “Sky TV,” from 1966 and James Turrell’s incredible “Skyspace” installations. Ono’s clever video piece was shown on a television inside a gallery, which [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=666
The history of giant, fluffy cumulonimbus clouds is discussed in Encyclopedia, but a San Francisco artist has embarked on an especially poetic project, “A History of the Sky.” It is simple, and stunning. A camera perched high on a city rooftop takes images of the sky every ten seconds, from dawn until sunset, and the synchronized images [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=634
