The ocean already makes music of its own, but in one Croatian town, its natural sounds are enhanced with the help of an interactive jetty-turned-instrument called ‘Sea Organ.’ Created by architect Nikola Basic in collaboration with engineers, craftspeople and a musical professor who tuned all of the pipes, the 230-foot installation on the coast of Zadar emits a constantly-changing concert of harmonic sounds with the flow of wind and water.

A system of polyethylene tubes and a resonating cavity are disguised beneath a set of marble steps leading straight into the Adriatic Sea. The channels connect to 35 organ pipes, and each set of steps containing five pipes is tuned to a different musical chord. As waves and the wind push air into the pipes, they create a haunting chorus of sound. The rougher the sea, the louder and faster the music.

The Zadar-Morske Orgulje, as it’s known locally, is also topped with an interactive display of LED lights that seem timed to show the movement of the water under the marble. This 22-meter-diameter, disc-shaped solar-powered installation called ‘Sun Salutation,’ also created by Basic, only serves to make the music of the sea even more magical.

Images via Flickr Creative Commons: linssimato, J We, Suzanne Hamilton, EyeofJ

The imagination readily fastens onto the anthropomorphic figures like those found in shipyards, turning looming metal giants into huge toy beasts, origami cranes writ large.

Lighting designer Dean Skira takes things a step further in this public exhibition titled Lighting Giants, using nearly 100 RGB LEDs to produce an array of colorful effects at a massive scale – 16,000 different possible hues in total.

Located in a major Croatian shipyard, the show involves a shifting spectrum of illumination that ranges from pure white to wild rainbows, all directed up into the rugged frameworks of industrial monstrosities.

The installation, funded by the ministry of tourism, was in part a response to calls for the relocation of the shipping infrastructure, seen by many as an eyesore. Instead of doing away with the cranes, a part of local industry and history, this work celebrates and highlights them.

About the artist: he is a “lighting designer with over twenty years of experience in designing innovative lighting solutions for urban, landscape, commercial and residential spaces. Even in his early childhood he was fascinated by light and its sources, strongly influenced by his father’s professional work in stained glass. He promotes an architectural lighting design concept that goes beyond utilitarian where lighting can have high impact on person’s emotional states.”

If you were to travel today through the area that was once Yugoslavia, you would come across some incredible massive objects that allow an unexpected look directly into the area’s past. Before dissolving into several smaller countries in the 1990s, Yugoslavia became home to a number of large-scale futuristic monuments.

(all images via: Human’s Scribbles)

The monuments, scattered all throughout the former Yugoslavia, were erected in the 1960s and 1970s by then-Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito. The Spomenik, which literally translates to “monuments,” are commemorative markers which immortalize WWII battle sites and locations of concentration camps.

Although the events marked by the monuments were dark, the sculptures themselves are utterly fantastical and otherworldly in nature. They were created by a number of different sculptors and architects, each piece imbued with a unique sense of cultural history.

The highly abstract objects take many unexpected shapes, appearing to represent giant models of microbes, huge crystals, deconstructed architecture, even alien plant life. The gigantic, mostly concrete, shapes reflect what was then a very strong, proud country. The form of each monument was selected for its symbolic meaning, having some sort of connection to the site on which it stands.

Throughout the 80s, the monuments were visited by millions of Yugoslavians, especially younger people who were pursuing their patriotic education. But when Yugoslavia dissolved, visits to the monuments dropped off almost entirely – and upkeep of the structures was abandoned.

Since the early 1990s, the monuments have been completely neglected. They sit there now, rising high above the surrounding trees and before majestic mountains, their historic origins becoming more obscured with every passing generation. Many of the desolate structures are crumbling into inscrutable ruins. Will these mysterious objects become the Stonehenges of the 20th century?

This series of Spomenik photos was created by Jan Kempenaers, a photographer who felt compelled to make the difficult journey through the Balkans to document the forgotten Yugoslavian giants. Using an old map of the monuments from 1975, he traveled to each of them in turn, capturing them in their current state of sad, melancholy glory.

Though the monuments themselves – the sculptures, completely removed of their meaning – are still quite striking, it is hard to ignore the pain and suffering that they represent. When they were erected, they were meant to bear witness to the atrocities that took place during WWII. Today, their meaning is nearly lost to time and political upheaval. Many incorrectly believe the structures to have been Communist propaganda material, but in fact the monuments were meant as tributes to the anti-fascist uprisers and everyone else who died in the second world war.

These lonely monoliths no longer immediately call to mind the approximately one million Yugoslavs killed in World War II. Over time, they have begun to look almost like natural parts of the landscape rather than the testament to human resilience and national pride they were meant to commemorate.

Insofar as it is possible to enjoy a work of art without knowing what it represents, stumbling across one of these monuments in the Balkans must be a truly awe-inspiring experience for foreign visitors. But we like to think that there are also some adventurous historians out there, still visiting the monuments to pay their respects to the fallen people they memorialize.