A unique, wind-driven kinetic sculpture will be erected outside CU-Boulder1s new Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory at the College of Engineering and Applied Science on Friday, Feb. 21, weather permitting.
The 10-foot-by-10-foot steel-framed sculpture will be made up of 10,000 small mylar disks that move freely on rivets, allowing the wind to generate a variety of individual patterns on the sculpture's face. The sculpture also will be interactive, allowing people to push a lever and create their own artistic patterns with the mylar disks, said ITLL Exhibits Director Steve Davis.
The sculpture was designed by noted San Francisco artist Ned Kahn, formerly of San Francisco's Exploratorium Museum. Kahn's sculpture, which will cost about $38,000, is being funded by the state of Colorado's 1 percent tax for the arts. Kahn's sculpture was the unanimous choice by the CU engineering judges in a competition for an outdoor ITLL exhibit.
The 800-pound sculpture will be mounted with a crane by the northeast door of the new ITLL facility, which opened this semester adjacent to the main engineering college. The $20 million undergraduate facility was designed to allow thousands of students to gain hands-on experience daily in designing and building real-world engineering projects.
The new facility will be officially dedicated on April 24.
For more information, contact Davis at 492-4676 or Jim Scott in the CU-Boulder public relations office at 492-3114.