Now he’s turned his attention to the energy crisis and imagined a future of fuelless flight with his new work Aerocene, which will debut at COP21, the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris this month.
Tomás Saraceno offers a beacon of hope for progress on global warming with his current project “Aerocene.” Installed at the Grand Palais in Paris, the work takes flight as delegates from 195 countries meet in the city for the United Nations climate change talks known as COP21, an effort to come up with legally binding solutions for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
Based on principles of thermodynamic energy, Saraceno’s two spherical sculptures are meant to rise during the day in response to solar heat and continue to stay afloat at night using infrared radiation from the Earth. They are made with a two-part membrane of silver-toned and transparent Mylar, then filled with one of the planet’s most overlooked natural resources—air. The sculptures are prototypes, part of a series of zero-emissions vehicles, which Saraceno has been building and testing for nearly eight years, with the ultimate hope of sending these air-based vehicles around the globe.
In a time of rapidly accelerating climate change, why do we still blast rockets into space, burning up vast amounts of hydrocarbons? Is it because it is the only way to get there? At the Border of Art and Space, and in the heart of America’s space landscape near the White Sands Dunes, Tomás Saraceno invites you to assist to the launch of the aerosolar sculpture “D-OAEC Aerocene”: Take part of a step forward towards a new era, where we don’t need a violent explosion to reach the stratosphere and we will not work against the forces of nature, but in synergy. Join Aerocene, an epoch led by aerosolar sculptures inflated by air, carried by the wind, lifted only by the harness of the sun during the day and infrared radiation from the surface during the night… and soon we will float around the world to change it together.
Tomás Saraceno
As an artist with an architectural background, Saraceno has built numerous large-scale projects focused on ecological issues that work across disciplines. Recent examples include Cloud Cities (2011), a utopian vision of floating cities which draws on science and art or On Space Time Foam (2012) and Arachnid Orchestra (2015) where Saraceno ventured into interspecies communication, working with humans and spiders.
Dates.- 7-8 December 2015
