Archive by category | Engineering

Machines moved by mind

Machines moved by mind

At Mental Work, an exhibition at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne ArtLab (EPFL), visitors can drive simple machines using the force of their own thoughts. Probing the rapidly changing relationship between humans and technology, these artworks will also generate vast amounts of data that will be shared with researchers around the world. The show is a collaboration between experimental philosopher Jonathan Keats and EPFL neuroengineer José Millán, who develops brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) to help people with paralysis. Here, Millán talks pistons, probability and the debate over who or what is in control.  Read more

The Colorado: elegy for an overused river

The Colorado River in xxx

The Colorado River in the US West proves the adage that you never step into the same river twice. Lined by a vast array of landscapes, communities and industries it has shaped, its waters run variously aqua, navy blue, muddy brown — or not at all. Over its 2,334 kilometres, it sustains some 40 million people, 2 million hectares of farmland and the Hoover Dam. It is also polluted, depleted, diverted.  Read more

Show home for the Red Planet

Mars show home at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, London.

A big red igloo with a towering antenna seems a little overblown for a London show home. And so it proves. The object squatting outside the Royal Observatory Greenwich is actually a life-sized mock-up of a Mars habitat, billed as the imaginary dwelling of a second wave of settlers from Earth. That is, those who might live on the Red Planet in their thousands by around 2037, if the ambitious plans of space entrepreneurs such as SpaceX’s Elon Musk bear fruit.  Read more

The art of engineering: 9 Evenings revisited

The art of engineering: 9 Evenings revisited

I’m gazing at a stage draped in white when a giant zipper suddenly appears, projected onto one wall. As it works its way noisily around, more projections — live-streamed or pre-recorded moving images of buildings, blurred pedestrians, discarded clothing and simmering water — judder on crumpled backdrops. An apparently random urban soundtrack lulls and roars in the background. In the foreground, performers skip rope and cut hair; one solemnly rips up, boils and eats her shirt. It’s quite an evening.  Read more

Smoke on the water

Smoke on the water

Nobody loves disasters more than movie producers. If threats in real life matched their frequency on screen, we should be in a constant state of panic over the risks of alien invasions, zombie viruses and asteroid impacts. Given the film industry’s appetite for catastrophes, it is no surprise that it has finally focused on the greatest environmental disaster in US history: the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began with explosions that killed 11 people and sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.  Read more

Master builder: Ove Arup

Ove Arup by Godfrey Argent, 1969

He was the structural innovator behind Sydney Opera House, founded the world’s leading engineering consultancy, and pioneered the philosophy of “total design” — the equal partnership of engineers, architects and designers in construction. Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup (1895-1988) is now celebrated in this first retrospective of his work, Engineering the World, at London’s Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, part of its Engineering Season.  Read more

Industrial optimist: Moholy-Nagy revisited

László Moholy-Nagy Dual Form with Chromium Rods, 1946 (Plexiglas and chrome-plated brass)

I’m standing in the spiraling rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, and over me dangles a chaotic mess held together by translucent Plexiglas. In the shadow the sculpture casts on the wall, the shapes converge in a pleasing negative blending intention and happenstance – impossible to predict, yet clearly part of a plan. On evidence, this is an artist thinking experimentally, and in multiple dimensions.  Read more

Five books for the COP negotiator

Five books for the COP negotiator

George Orwell, author of dystopian classics Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, was a political animal par excellence. He understood how the language of politics could give “an appearance of solidity to pure wind”, as he put it in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. Those words should blast right through the miasmas forming over Paris as COP21 enters its second week.  Read more