summer in a Dutch park

Unfortunately I didn't find any traces of the Expresso Urbano in Buenos Aires during my holidays. My great tour guide of the city had heard of the system, saying it had been installed at a time when there was much Europeanisation of the city, but that it has not been adequately maintained (or well documented), and like many other infrastructures, fell into disrepair.

While I was hunting for tubes in South America, there were exciting pneumatic happenings in my resident country, The Netherlands. In a park in Groningen, an installation of transparent pneumatic tubes, powered by a household vacuum cleaner, provided delight to passersby.

Designed as a "more accessible, less world-ending, foamier version" of pneumatic tubes, the installation of tubes, containing 1000 black sponge balls whizzing around, is a creation of the artist Niklas Roy.

The installation is interactive - park visitors can change the airflow direction and speed of the balls through motion sensors. The artist has uploaded his own tube cam footage, using a spy camera. You can watch the Fantastic Voyage here.

All images are the artists, used under the creative commons lisence. You can find many more photos of the installation here and of the making of the installation here.

pneumatic circus

I have covered various artistic interpretations of pneumatic tubing systems before on this blog, as well as museum displays for children, but I have just been told about one of the most imaginative, interactive and creative pneumatic tube artistic installations yet: PNEUMAtic circUS.

PNEUMAtic circUS was a networked postal art project curated by Vittore Baroni, music critic, "explorer of countercultures", and avid activist for mail art, in collaboration with Tatiana Bazzichelli (sociologist of communication with interest in hactivism), Jonas Frankki (designer responsible for Berlin collective Telekommunisten) and Mauro Guazzotti (leader of experimental noise/industrial band). It was held as part of the transmediale festival for art and digital culture, from January to February 2013 in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

The project involved one hundred mail artists sending in pneumatic post capsules with instructions and scores to be used by the festival visitors for actions and performances.

Artists came from sixteen countries. That is twice as many countries as arms of an octopus, the mascot for the project, also fabulously called P7C-1 Intertubular Octosocial Pneumatical Postal Network, with its tentacles of tubing spreading across the installation space.

You can find the gorgeous catalogue from the installation here (front cover below), with essays from the curators and many images too. The digital catalogue was unveiled recently in Viareggio, the launch marked by further pneumatic performances, with a workshop where attendees could create and transmit their own messages.

See also the Telekommunisten.net website for more about the exhibition and a terrific "inside the OCTO" video.

Images used with permission from the PNEUMAtic circUS Flikr page.