February 2, 2010
I've been searching for historical and primary source material for Project Echo, one of NASA's earliest missions, which kicked into high gear in 1958. The giant, inflatable satelloons were functional--passive reflection communication satellites. That they were shaped just like...
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6:58 AM
January 12, 2010
Regular readers of greg.org will recall the Moon Museum. Initiated by the artist Frosty Myers--who know prefers to be called Forrest Myers, I take it--the Moon Museum was the first art on the moon, a tiny ceramic chip containing...
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10:50 PM
December 17, 2009
The American Museum of Natural History maintains a Digital Universe Atlas, which maps all the objects in the universe using the most current data available. They just released The Known Universe, an animated version of the data, in conjunction...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
At the 1931 Beaux Arts Ball, more than a dozen New York architects came dressed as their buildings: [l to r] A. Stewart Walker [Fuller Building], Leonard Schultze [Waldorf-Astoria], Ely Jaques Kahn [Squibb Building], William Van Alen [Chrysler Building,...
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7:48 AM
December 12, 2009
A periodic check on eBay for Project Echo-related material turned up this photo from April 29, 1963: "NASA-MERCURY, HANGAR 5, CCMTA - Left to Right - William Carmines and William Armstrong of NASA describe the balloon experiment for the...
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Posted by greg at
9:14 PM
November 13, 2009
The first Project Echo satelloon may have started out as a 100-meter sphere, but it didn't stay that way. Echo IA launched on August 12, 1960, and it stayed in orbit and visible to the naked eye until May...
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Posted by greg at
4:05 PM
Thaddeus S. C. Lowe was once one of the country's most famous aeronauts. His grand plan to fly a balloon across the Atlantic was shelved by the outbreak of the Civil War. He preferred to be called Professor. On...
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Posted by greg at
11:50 AM
October 27, 2009
From the Other Things I Didn't Know About What Goes Inside Geodesic Dome Pavilions Department: Christine Macy and Sarah Bonnemaison devote a chapter in their 2003 book, Architecture and nature: creating the American landscape to geodesic domes, including this description...
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Posted by greg at
11:16 PM
How to account for my dogged fascination with the temporary/permanent, futuristic/historic paradoxes of Expo art and architecture? Buckminster Fuller's 20-story Biosphere was far and away his greatest single success and the hit of the most successful modernist world's fair,...
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Posted by greg at
12:17 PM
October 12, 2009
This 1960 LIFE Magazine photo by Grey Villet of Antenna bouncing first message off Echo I satellite is a great, uh, echo of Trevor Paglen's The Other Night Sky series....
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2:40 PM
September 14, 2009
It's got shiny spheres, and science re-creations, and DC artists and quotes from curator and museum director friends. But it's been a few weeks now, and the only thing I can say about Blake Gopnik's mind-numbing/blowing article on Jim Sanborn...
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1:58 PM
September 13, 2009
Just like how, once you've learned it, you start hearing a word all the time, now I see satelloons everywhere. Including at the Buckminster Fuller retrospective last year at the Whitney [which went on to Chicago this summer.] Buckminster...
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Posted by greg at
9:09 PM
September 12, 2009
In a 1970 paper, two Harvard/Smithsonian scientists proposed A Passive Stable Satellite for Accurate Laser Ranging. Dubbed project Cannonball, the 38-cm spherical satellite would be covered with triangular reflectors and would weigh--did someone drop a decimal?--a prodigious 8000 pounds. Cannonball...
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Posted by greg at
9:22 PM
September 6, 2009
San Francisco Ocean Film Festival - "Space Flight Dolphin - the art of SETI", originally uploaded by oceanfilmfest. Space Flight Dolphin is a life-sized "inflatable dolphin sculpture/satellite by the space artist Richard Clar. The sculpture/satellite will be made from...
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Posted by greg at
10:16 PM
While we contemplate the Colombian Heart Attack that has befallen Washington DC, it might be worthwhile to remember the good old days, such as they were, when the National Mall was the site of ambitious public art projects. Projects...
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Posted by greg at
1:48 PM
August 26, 2009
According to BoingBoing, the Sierra Nevada Corporation's been testing its SA-60 Spherical Airship at the Reno-Stead Airport. [SNC's the same company whose surveillance blimp was set to be mooned this month by 1,500 hundred angry Canadians in the quiet...
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Posted by greg at
1:42 PM
August 4, 2009
Assman's Balloon (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress. William Assman was a balloon racer from St. Louis who attempted several times to win the John Gordon Bennett Trophy, a flying endurance competition to spur development of gas...
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Posted by greg at
1:25 PM
July 21, 2009
If I'm a little high right now, it's just because these conservators just hit like every art button I have:To photo-document Spiral Jetty, we used a tethered helium balloon about 8-10 feet in diameter, attached to a digital camera...
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Posted by greg at
1:55 PM
July 16, 2009
Herbert Muschamp in a giant weather balloon movie in Monaco WHAT?This is something we did in Monaco where we put Herbert Muschamp's text, "Bubbles in the Wine," to film. It was my job to go out and find these...
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Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
June 28, 2009
Josh Foer is on fire, and I'm like a moth to the flame. Foer's guestblogging at BoingBoing, and is just lobbing up one crazy-awesome megasphere after another. It was his charticle in Cabinet a while back about the history...
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9:56 PM
June 24, 2009
VOISIN STANDARD TYPE BIPLANE (1909), originally uploaded by public.resource.org. The Grand Palais was already the best of the three venues in the world capable of accommodating my Satelloon project--a re-creation of NASA's Project Echo (1960), the 100-ft metallic spherical...
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Posted by greg at
12:11 AM
June 21, 2009
Downtown Megastructures, originally uploaded by sokaris73. I can't find any details online about this "Downtown Megastructures" image by Klaus Pinter and his colleagues in the Austrian architecture collaborative Haus-Rucker beyond what sokaris73 put in the flickr caption: it dates...
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Posted by greg at
10:01 PM
May 31, 2009
In 1972, the Austrian architecture collective Haus-Rucker installed Oasis Nr 7 at Documenta 5. A steel pipe structure was cantilevered out the window of the Friedericianum, and a platform, two palm trees, and a hammock were installed. The entire...
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Posted by greg at
11:46 PM
May 26, 2009
Amazing to think that all this was happening at the same time as the satelloons of Project Echo and just five years after Sputnik. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory director William Pickering was the grand marshal of the 1963 Rose...
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Posted by greg at
8:28 PM
March 17, 2009
taro blimp, originally uploaded by hige_megane. While I would like a blimp--or technically, a satelloon--on display, I think I want to forgo the life-sized mannequin of myself. Thanks all the same. [via andy] taro okamoto museum, originally uploaded by...
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Posted by greg at
4:13 PM
March 13, 2009
It seems the Pentagon has gotten wind of my master plan to re-create satelloons, the giant, inflated satellites with the integrated reflective communications capability, and they're trying to beat me to the punch with a $400 million, 450-foot-long, inflated surveillance...
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Posted by greg at
2:48 PM
February 21, 2009
Awesome, I just read through the announcement of the 2008 Arts Writers Grant recipients, and I have to give a huge shoutout to Paddy Johnson whose Art Fag City is one of the first two blogs to be recognized by...
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Posted by greg at
11:25 PM
February 4, 2009
There's nothing specific on the horizon, but the way things are going, what with all the domes and mirrored domes and Buckminster Fuller and movies and all around here... I mean, you never really know--and by you, I obviously...
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Posted by greg at
11:19 PM
January 13, 2009
Buy this nice c-print study of Gregor Schneider's unrealized Cube Venice at Sotheby's next month, and they'll throw in a fatwa for free! Sale L09621, Feb 6, 2009, LOT 213: GREGOR SCHNEIDER, CUBE VENICE, 2005, numbered 2/6, 3,000--4,000 GBP...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 AM
November 8, 2008
Though with their combination of Ikean sculpture, reconstituted Cold War satellites, and geodesic dome playthings, I'm now not sure I'm not actually just a random projection of their collaborative imagination. Daniel Young and Christian Giroux began making work together in...
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Posted by greg at
10:43 PM
June 11, 2008
When I first discovered satelloons a few months ago, I admit, I was a little disappointed to have fallen so hard for the first generation satelloons of Project Echo. This disappointment kicked in when I saw this photo of...
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Posted by greg at
3:39 PM
June 8, 2008
Macy's, State Street, Chicago, originally uploaded by Katnp. Macy's has installed Jeff Koons' 53-ft tall Bunny balloon in its Chicago store [f/k/a Marshall Fields] in conjunction with the Koons retrospective at the MCA. Katnp has more Bunny photos on...
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Posted by greg at
3:24 PM
May 26, 2008
Promenade is Richard Serra's commission for Monumenta, the contemporary arts program inaugurated last year in the nave of the newly restored Grand Palais in Paris. Serra's work consists of five 17x4-meter steel plates set vertically along the central axis...
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Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
March 11, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Géode, originally uploaded by zyber. But darned if it isn't pretty damn close. La Géode...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 AM
November 21, 2007
Alright, the clock is ticking, only hours to go until Jeff Koons' largest work to date, a 53-foot high balloon based on his 1986 sculpture, Rabbit, bobs down the west side in Macy's parade. It was made using a...
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Posted by greg at
9:20 PM
October 27, 2007
The Joshua Foer photo timeline, "A Minor History of Giant Spheres," that got me all hopped up on Satelloons, is now online. It's in the latest issue of Cabinet Magazine. And while you should always buy or subscribe to Cabinet,...
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Posted by greg at
9:49 AM
October 8, 2007
Yes, I do have a ton of other things I should be doing, but I can't seem to get Project Echo out of my head. I really want to see this, 100+ foot spherical satellite balloon, "the most beautiful...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
October 7, 2007
image: NASM From about 1956 until 1964, US aeronautics engineers and rocket scientists at the Langley Research Center developed a series of spherical satellite balloons called, awesomely enough, satelloons. Dubbed Project Echo, the 100-foot diameter aluminumized balloons were one...
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Posted by greg at
11:00 AM
