A Giant, Mirrored Hot Air Balloon Is Currently Traveling Over Massachusetts

A cool breeze sweeps in off the Atlantic Ocean, rustling the grassy coastline of Long Point Wildlife Refuge on Martha’s Vineyard’s south shore. It’s 7 a and a crowd has begun forming in anticipation: Will this be the gust that sets artist Doug Aitken ’s mirrored hot air balloon, a traveling art installation, into flight?

Unfortunately, so far Mother Nature hasn’t been cooperative, blowing gusts off the coastline that inflate the oversized hot air balloon, which is made of nylon coated in a layer of highly reflective mylar, only for it to deflate a few minutes later. But Aitken doesn’t appear to be the least bit perturbed. He knew from the moment he came up with the concept to create a giant roving sculpture that he would be at nature’s mercy, and he’s up to the challenge.

It all began when The Trustees of Reservations , a nonprofit land conservation and historic preservation organization in Massachusetts, tasked Boston-based independent curator Pedro Alonzo to find an artist.

"I started hanging out by the dunes over here between the lagoon and the ocean and thinking, oh my God, what am I going to do here?" Alonzo says. "I was thinking about who I could bring here who could have an impact. This is not any easy place [to create an installation]. But I've been wanting to work with [artist Doug Aitken] for 20 years."

So Alonzo approached the L.A.-based multimedia artist and filmmaker to create an installation for The Trustees' Art & the Landscape public art series. Rather than choose one site out of the 117 sprinkled throughout Massachusetts that are in The Trustees’ care, they picked several, including the 632-acre refuge where the balloon kicked off its multi-week journey this past weekend.

“I wanted to [create an installation] that wasn’t static or fixed, but could change locations while also transforming itself [along the way],” Aitken says. “It became a mental exercise for me on how we could break stasis and have flow, and then I came up with the idea of making an artwork that could fly and would make the journey part of the narrative.”

The result is New Horizon , a 100-foot-tall nomadic art piece that is traversing the state and making pit stops at Trustees properties in Greater Boston and the Berkshires now through July 28. At each location, it will be tethered and serve as a backdrop for a lineup of concerts; discussions about timely topics such climate change, creativity and the economy; and other curated events. The idea comes as an evolution to another project Aitken did in 2017 called Mirage , a mirror-paneled home nestled in the California desert.

“This project in general is a little bit like a lighthouse,” says Aitken. “We're creating both a beacon of light where people can come and share, but we can also project these stories and narratives to an audience.”

Together Aitken and Alonzo began researching hot air balloons and the arduous task of building one that would be mirrored to capture the landscape. The pair became immersed in New Mexico’s popular ballooning subculture, home of the world’s largest hot air balloon festival , and Aitken discussed the feasibility of the project with an expert at NASA, focusing specifically on materials and structure. In addition, multiple test flights were done leading up to the project's completion to ensure its flyability and safety.

“It was something that we built from the ground up,” Aitken says. “The gondola is made from scratch and was made to serve as a kind of nomadic studio that a musician could use to improvise sound while flying over the landscape or a poet could use to recite spoken word.”

Within the gondola, there are jacks for microphones and other equipment to be plugged in should performers want to use the balloon.

But despite the many months of planning, Aitken is well aware of the unpredictable nature of hot air balloon flight. If there’s little to no wind on any given day or the surrounding air temperature becomes too warm, there's no choice but to ground the installation for the day, which was the case for the morning flight at the coastal refuge. But the fickle nature of the project is also what keeps Aitken inspired—tomorrow is one more opportunity to take flight.

Here is a full schedule and ticket information for the upcoming New Horizon events.

With Augmented Reality, You Can Now Superimpose Publicly Exhibited Artworks in Your Home

For a week in October, LED trucks featuring animated, illuminated quotes from conceptual artist Jenny Holzer ’s latest public art project, You Be My Ally , drove around downtown Chicago and the city’s South Side. Those walking on the University of Chicago’s campus can currently use their phones to project all 29 quotes from the project, selected from texts from the University’s Core Curriculum, onto seven university buildings using a free web-based augmented reality app.

But for the first time, using the same app , art enthusiasts can also superimpose a public exhibit of Holzer’s work—each of the quotes—in their own houses, or wherever they might be. Instead of seeing the words Suddenly incoherence feels violent, a quote from “Citizen,” Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem, rolling up the sleek Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed façade of the university’s School of Social Service Administration, users can experience this zooming towards them from a distant spot in their kitchen or bathroom.

Museums and galleries have been exhibiting site-specific augmented reality works by artists for a few years, but the University of Chicago is one of a handful of global institutions taking AR one step further during the pandemic—to bring publicly exhibited artworks directly into people’s homes.

Holzer has created text-based public art installations all over the world, which have included light projections onto buildings, advertising billboards and LED signs. The initial plan for You Be My Ally had included one of Holzer’s signature light projections on campus, the LED trucks, and either a site-specific augmented reality component, or one that could be accessed anywhere.

“Jenny’s studio had first done an AR app as part of her Blenheim Palace project in the UK [in 2017], and she wanted to come back to that,” says Christine Mehring, an art history professor and adjunct curator at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art and one of the project’s coordinators.

Then Covid-19 hit, and the light projection, which would have encouraged large groups to gather to see it, was off the table. Instead, both site-specific AR works and an AR experience that people could enjoy anywhere would go ahead. “When it emerged that so many students and faculty would not be on campus, we really pushed the idea of having both in parallel,” says Mehring.

Four thousand miles away, London’s Serpentine Galleries found themselves grappling with a similar problem. They had just started exhibiting The Eternal Wave , a virtual reality experience by multimedia artist Cao Fei. The work, produced with Acute Art, a VR and AR production company that works exclusively with artists, begins in the gallery in a physical rendition of the kitchen in the Hongxia Theatre, originally a cinema for Beijing’s factory workers, which closed in 2008 and later became Cao Fei’s studio. From there, the visitor travels through various portals, moving through time and space to explore the computers of China’s early electronics industry and the area in and around the Hongxia Theatre.

“I think it was probably the most advanced artistic piece of VR ever produced,” says Daniel Birnbaum, curator of Acute Art, “but a few days after the opening, the gallery had to close because of Covid.” When the galleries did reopen on August 4, The Eternal Wave, which required the use of shared headsets, did not.

Working with the Serpentine Galleries, Acute Art came up with Plan B, which was to turn The Eternal Wave into an augmented reality experience. That included a site-specific AR version of The Eternal Wave —beginning in the kitchen space installed in the gallery and taking users on a multi-sensory journey—and a small sample of that work that users could access anywhere using the Acute Art app on their phones. The sample, a nine-minute video, takes users on an animated exploration of the theatre and beyond.

“We wanted a site-specific piece that people could access on their own devices,” says Kay Watson, the Serpentine’s digital curator. “But because exhibition capacity is now vastly reduced, it was also really important to offer another AR component that people could use at home.”

AR fine art that people can superimpose anywhere may be very new, but it has many interesting applications beyond the pandemic. Artists and art institutions can take artworks to a new and potentially global audience of art lovers, who may be unable to visit major galleries or museums.

Artists producing site-specific AR or VR works can add different but complementary AR experiences for users anywhere, without detracting from the original work. And, unlike site-specific AR art, users can become co-curators of the art by superimposing it against any backdrop. “It becomes this interactive game, almost like a participatory art form,” says Birnbaum.

That was crucial for You Be My Ally, which was conceived to bring elements of the Core Curriculum, selected from quotes suggested by University of Chicago students, to the biggest audience possible, and to invite users to find new meanings in its texts. “By projecting Reality is not is guaranteed [from The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt] on the Logan Center for the Arts on campus, maybe you think about illusionism and art as an alternate reality,” says Mehring. “When you see it in a public context, or even a political context, right now, in the context of fake news, the quote begins to mean something totally different.”

Enabling users to embed art in their own homes also forces them to think differently about it. “There’s something beautiful, evocative, but also unsettling about seeing something in your phone’s camera, in your own home, your most familiar environment, and have it not be what is actually in front of you,” Mehring says.

Acute Art produced some of its very first immersive artworks in 2017 and 2018 using virtual reality, a completely virtual experience where users wear headsets. At that time, Acute Art collaborated with Anish Kapoor, Marina Abramović, Olafur Eliasson and others. Art using augmented reality, where virtual elements are embedded in the real world that users see through their phone cameras, has come a long way since then. “We did AR experiments then, but I always thought these were limited in their reach, because these are things you see on your phone,” says Birnbaum.

When Acute Art produced density in 2019, a site-specific AR work by artist Koo Jeong A that took the form of a large, translucent, levitating ice cube and toured several different art institutions, it was praised for its low environmental impact. “We could show this quite beautiful AR object hovering in the air all over the world without shipping anything,” says Birnbaum. “It gave us a glimpse of future exhibitions and curatorial models that we have not fully explored yet.”

Birnbaum concluded that AR art might become an important tool to tackle climate change one day, but it was actually Covid-19 that created an immediate need for it. “Things that I thought might become more urgent in five or 10 years were urgent now,” he says. “No one could travel and everyone was at home. VR was hard with art museums and galleries closed, so AR has been our sole focus for the last half year. It’s evolved so quickly.”

Since March, Acute Art has produced augmented reality works for nine artists, including KAWS, Olafur Eliasson and Koo Jeong A, that, can be placed on any surface wherever the user is, either individually or together, using the Acute Art app. Those who missed the site-specific version of density can now conjure it up at home , hovering over the couch or floating over their beds.

While both site-specific AR art and AR art that can be accessed anywhere allow artists to bypass museums and galleries altogether, Birnbaum believes that arts institutions will still play a role, by incorporating more AR elements to reach audiences beyond their doors, particularly while physical travel is limited and exhibitions that rely on huge foot traffic are unrealistic.

The Serpentine was doing just that even before the pandemic hit. In February 2019 , it launched a global open call for artist submissions to the Serpentine Augmented Architecture Program , a new collaboration with Google Arts and Culture and Sir David Adjaye. By July 2019, the gallery unveiled the first commission, The Deep Listener by Danish artist Jacob Kudsk Steensen.

Users who launch The Deep Listener app on site are taken on a guided tour of five species living in London’s Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, the area surrounding the Serpentine Galleries. At each location, users can overlay an augmented reality experience and reactive audio about each species, which changes speed as you walk around. Users who launch the app anywhere else in the world access a slightly different AR experience.

The Serpentine has produced several other AR exhibits in 2019 and 2020, including The London Masaba (AR) Hyde Park launched in this past July, an exact virtual replica of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s stacked barrel sculpture that floated on Serpentine Lake for three months in 2018.

Another collaboration with Acute Art, users of Acute Art’s app can see the site-specific sculpture floating on the lake outside the Serpentine Galleries, or place another version into their own environment. The site-specific work will become a permanent exhibit, reviving what was a temporary sculpture and providing a lasting tribute to Christo, who died this past May.

“AR was already enabling us to engage with audiences in new ways, but that’s particularly important now,” says Watson. “We’re really thinking about who our audiences are—online, offline, onsite, offsite—as we develop programs for the next few years, because things are going to be different.”

Watson rejects the idea that providing programming for offsite visitors might dissuade them from returning to institutions in person once the pandemic is over. “Visiting art institutions will always be important,” she says. “I’m longing for it, personally. I certainly don’t think of augmented reality as a replacement to that. It’s about expanding and extending participation.”

For the first time this year, the Serpentine Galleries produced a strategic briefing to share what they’ve learned about AR and other technologies with other cultural institutions. But Watson thinks it’s already easier for artists and institutions to experiment with AR today because the technology is more accessible. She points out that all of the Serpentine’s AR projects, including The Deep Listener , which they produced in house, were made using free and widely available game engines, the software used to render video game environments.

Free web-based tools allow artists to make their own AR filters for social media channels, like Instagram. In response to the pandemic, all the 70-plus artworks exhibited across New York City this October during Digital Art Month were AR works and all of them were rendered with Instagram filters. When people came across an artist’s name, bio and QR code in the street, they could scan the code to automatically activate the artist’s AR filters on Instagram, which could be superimposed on their current location, or used at home later.

“With this type of AR, the barriers to entry are lower. Artists who have never worked with Insta filters before have created their first AR works specificially for New York’s Digital Art Month,” says Elena Zavelev, founder and CEO of the Contemporary and Digital Art Fair, the art fair which co-sponsored the month-long festival. Digital Art Month: Miami is now in the works for December.

Zavelev thinks that AR will be an increasingly popular medium for artists, particularly compared to VR, which is expensive, difficult to produce and requires headsets. “AR is an elegant way to bring this fantasy layer into the real world just using your phone. You can just use an Instagram filter to place a fantastic creature in your house,” she says.

The Smithsonian Institution, which has gradually been reopening museums since late July, is collaborating with Facebook to create AR experiences for Instagram. This December, the Smithsonian will launch 10 Instagram filters that users can add to their stories that put objects from the museum collections in their homes. Transport a triceratops into your backyard, a pair of boots worn by the Wizard in the Broadway musical “The Wiz” into your closet, or the National Museum of Asian Art’s Cosmic Buddha into your living room. The project leverages the Smithsonian’s Open Access 3-D objects and adds interactive and educational features to the filters, from annotated facts to animations to sound effects.

Complex institutional AR projects usually require that artists collaborate with a technology partner, an obstacle and a leap of faith for many artists who have never worked in this medium. To tackle the remote AR component of You Be My Ally , for example, Jenny Holzer’s studio brought in the London digital agency Holition to join Mark Hellar, the technology consultant already working on the project.

The technology can be a barrier for users too, particularly for older generations. “For some people, the hurdle of even opening up the app is pretty high,” says Mehring. “And if it doesn’t work, or they can’t figure out how to make it work right away, you can lose so many people.”

However, You Be My Ally has convinced Mehring that as an artistic medium, AR, with its layers of artifice and reality, is here to stay. “One way of telling the history of art is as a history of illusionism, and AR ties right in there,” she says, adding that from the first generations of print makers to video artists, artists have always embraced new ways to bring art into people’s homes.

AR that can be accessed anywhere could be a new powerful tool for institutions to enhance their global impact well beyond the pandemic. “When institutions get artworks out to people where they live, they’re testing out their relevance,” says Mehring. “Art needs to live up to that challenge.”

Didn’t Make the National Spelling Bee? Play the Smithsonian Spelling Bee

This week, we have a lot of really smart kids in town here to compete in the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee. The preliminaries began this morning at 8 AM EST and while we’re sure we couldn’t beat the 275 spellers in competition this year, the ATM blog team has come up with a list of words from around the Smithsonian, likely to stump even the savviest speller.

1. The P-Horse . It’s so hard to spell and pronounce that even the Zoo resorts to this nickname for the Przewalski’s Horse . Pronounced sheh-val-skee , the horse is named after 19th-century Polish naturalist Colonel Nikolai Przewalski, who found a skull of the horse and studied it in St. Petersburg. The brown-coated equine is native to eastern Europe and the Great Steppe crossing into Asia.

2. Artists —While math is the subject most commonly cited as a favorite among the spelling bee competitors this year, it doesn’t really require a lot of complicated spelling. Art or artists, rather, frequently do. The ATM staff has to be extra careful when writing about Georgia O’Keeffe (two e’s, two f’s), James McNeill Whistler (two l’s, no a) or Charles Willson (two l’s) Peale. The worst one is Eadweard Muybridge, who has way too many vowels in his first name. Check out their work at the American Art Museum and see if their art is any easier to understand than their names are to spell.

3. Volcanoes —Last year, a volcano erupted in Iceland, shutting down air traffic across Europe for days and affecting millions of passengers. Its name, the impossible to decipher Eyjafjallajökull. Considering that the bee contestants hail from around the United States, its territories and Department of Defense schools around the world, some might perchance live near one of the tough volcano names studied by the scientists at the Global Volcanism Program.

4. History —To help prepare for a spelling bee, many competitors study the origins of words. Learning about the origins of man, dinosaurs, civilizations and ancient life forms might be just as daunting. Walk around the halls of the Natural History Museum and learn more about ornithology, ichthyology, Ardipithecus ramidus , Australopithecus afarensis and Paranthropus boisei , including how to spell them. Over at American History, there’s Evel Knievel’s motorcycle and the Stephen Colbert portrait. Why is it pronounced like he’s French? Is he hiding something from us?

5. Airplanes —Some of this year’s competitors traveled long distances to arrive at the bee, including 94 who are on their very first visit to the nation’s capital. But none probably rode on airplanes with names as complicated as: De Havilland, Mikoyan-Gurevich or Messerschmitt. See what other aeronautical tongue twisters you can find at the Air and Space Museum.