Most of us have wished, at some point, that we could control the weather – to keep it from raining on a special day, perhaps, or conjure up a snowstorm that results in a few days off work and school. Artist, designer and animator Karolina Sobecka has come about as close as one individual can with ‘Cloud Machine‘, an invention that travels up into the atmosphere with a weather balloon.
Cloud Machine may not be able to create or disperse storms, but what it can do is still pretty fun: once it reaches a specific altitude, it disperses Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN) heat and water vapor. This causes moisture in the air to condense into cloud droplets around the CCN, creating small clouds.
“This method is inspired by a geo-engineering technique proposed to create brighter, more reflective clouds which shield earth from sun’s radiation, and thus partly counteract the climate change,” says Sobecka.
The Cloud Machine is part of Amateur Human and Nephologies, a project commissioned by V2_Institute for Unstable Media for a Blowup event exploring “the how and why of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology and artistic practice.”
via PSFK
