visual data

We can generally tell if the wind is blowing north, south, east or west, but on a smaller scale, currents are a lot more complicated. And that’s something I didn’t really appreciate before Windswept.
Windswept is an art installation at San Francisco’s Randall Museum that celebrates the intricacies of wind interacting with architecture. To create the effect, designer Charles Sowers deployed 612 freely-rotating anodized aluminum arrows on a 20'x35' grid, each serving as a “discrete data point” of extremely local airflow to form “a kind of large sensor array.”

With all of these data points firing at once, the result is fascinating and a touch hypnotic. Whereas I’d expect the entire wall of arrows to point the same way, they never do. Instead, it’s more like watching the Plinko of air currents, with every peg offering a largely unpredictable--but in retrospect inevitable--possibility...