August 25, 2010
Holy smokes, Gordon Hyatt, I didn't know what you did 44 summers ago. Among the episodes of CBS's news program "Eye on New York" which were acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1967 for their Television Archive...
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12:47 PM
July 21, 2010
Holy smokes, people, just watch how these things turn out. In April, I spotted this photo at MoMA; it was in the second floor hallway just past the cafe, with no caption, and a date: 1970. I spent a...
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12:09 AM
July 8, 2010
Wow, I knew about the Moon Museum segment because Jade Dellinger emailed about it. But I didn't know the first episode of this season's History Detectives also included a whole segment on satelloons and Project Echo. I love how they...
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2:43 PM
June 28, 2010
This one's been sitting on my desktop since April when I posted about that Jan. 1961 Popular Science article about how they made the Project Echo satelloon on a long table with giant clothespins. It was in May, only...
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10:21 PM
June 7, 2010
Whoa, check that out! The Moon Museum's on the Tee Vee! Or it will be, June 21st. The PBS show History Detectives is trying to figure out whether the Moon Museum, a SIM card-sized ceramic wafer created in 1969...
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7:16 AM
June 4, 2010
Bell Labs' Billy Kluver guided Andy Warhol to the Mylar balloons the artist used for Silver Clouds, his 1966 installation at Leo Castelli Gallery. And at Ferus Gallery. And at the Cincinnati Arts Center. At the time, Bell Labs...
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11:33 AM
June 1, 2010
The architecture and art collective Ant Farm first proposed The Dolphin Embassy in Esquire magazine in 1974. When they ended up meeting the owner of the Dolphinarium in Australia a couple of years later, they worked it up into...
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11:46 PM
May 21, 2010
A digitized collection of vintage NASA Goddard Space Flight Center newsletters led me to the June 23, 1963 issue of LIFE Magazine. If it were possible for any photo of a Project Echo satelloon to be slightly less than awesome,...
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11:41 AM
April 27, 2010
Alright, all y'all who didn't tell me about Otto Piene's classic of the books-written-in-longhand era, More Sky: what else have you been hiding?Otto Piene literally opens up new horizons here in both art and art education. His book is a...
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4:35 PM
April 20, 2010
While researching the National Gallery of Art's Barkley L. Hendricks paintings, which were purchased by J. Carter Brown with money from Michael Whitney Straight, I came across one of the crazier space-meets-art moments in the history of exhibition design: Art...
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7:06 AM
April 18, 2010
Following on to their 2008 retrospective of ZERO, Sperone Westwater is exhibiting work by the group's co-founder, Otto Piene. " Otto Piene: Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, 1957-1967" runs through May 22nd. [16 Miles has very nice installation shots.]...
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2:50 PM
April 16, 2010
They're both under-known, and so they probably deserve their own posts, but the uncanny similarity of these two Alcoa Forecast program designs requires me to put them together. Greta Magnusson Grossman was a Los Angeles-based Swedish industrial designer. According to...
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8:45 PM
April 13, 2010
While I remember where it came from, here's another image found in that Jan. 1961 Popular Science story starring William O'Sullivan Jr, who headed Project Echo and the whole satelloon paradigm at the fledgling NASA. When you see a...
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3:31 PM
April 12, 2010
Paul Brodeur in Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, September 3, 1960. The abstract pretty much captures the whole, short piece:Comment on attending Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" at Central Park's outdoor Belvedere Lake Theatre. We noticed...
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11:19 PM
March 31, 2010
I've been looking into how Google Street View panoramas are made, and it's been kind of awesome. Each equirectangular panorama is stitched together on the fly out of 21 photos. Equirectangular projection, or plate carrée (flat square), is a...
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8:01 AM
March 24, 2010
Suddenly silver mirrored balls are everywhere. Music video and filmmaker Roel Wouters created the trailer for last year's International Film Festival Breda: A silver sphere on an endless checkerboard floor is the default for many 3D modeling applications. It can...
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5:01 PM
March 23, 2010
I could feel Mondo-Blogo was baiting me as I scrolled through the photos from MoonFire, Taschen's luscious 2009 commemorative book for the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. He was amped about the text by Norman Mailer, and the...
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10:48 PM
March 19, 2010
It doesn't feel like a tangent to go from satelloons and museums on the moon to other aesthetic aspects of space and the space race. Plus there's the fascination at discovering, as a grown man, how much I hadn't...
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9:45 PM
March 14, 2010
Part of re-creating the Project Echo satelloons as art objects is tracking down the documentation and history of it all, identifying archives and primary source materials, and finding out how, exactly NASA built these early, early satellites. Because it's...
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5:41 PM
March 12, 2010
Ken Knowlton's artistic collaborations have been less well-known that his Bell Labs colleague, Billy Kluver, who created E.A.T. Experiements with Art & Technology, with Robert Rauschenberg and who introduced Andy Warhol to Mylar. But we'll get to that. In...
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12:54 PM
March 9, 2010
I'm still looking for the c. 1958-9 images of the 12-foot satelloon prototype being inflated in the US Capitol Building as part of NASA's push to fund the 100-foot version. But look what I found in the March 14, 1961...
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8:53 PM
February 24, 2010
For all my talk lately about satelloons, Olafur's stayed very politely quiet about his own giant, swinging aluminum balls. Maybe because he only has one? Seriously, though, I hope it's an edition. Your Imploded View is a 51-inch diameter, 660-lb...
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10:20 PM
February 20, 2010
The giant, reflective aluminized mylar satelloons of Project Echo were designed to be seen by the naked eye from anywhere on earth. As I trace down depictions and accounts of seeing them, I wonder how watched they actually were...
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2:52 PM
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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11:00 AM
