Pi In The Sky

See some weird clouds in the Bay Area around noon? They're just a little piece of pi.

Crave a relief from the iPhone 5 coverage? Look up.

In conjunction with the start of the ZERO1 Biennial, a San Jose-based art and technology project, artist Ishky has launched (quite literally) Pi in the Sky, an art project that has been months and a Kickstarter in the making. If you looked up around noon today, you saw the fruit of his labors: the numbers of pi, written in the air. It had a span of around 100 miles and is being billed as the world's "largest ephemeral installation."

How did he do it? From his website:

At 10,000 feet altitude working with our technical partner Airsign, a team of five synchronized aircraft equipped with dot-matrix technology will skywrite the first 1,000 numbers of pi’s infinite sequence in a 100-plus-mile loop around the San Francisco Bay Area. Each number will measure over a quarter-mile in height. A sixth Airsign plane will fly above the writing team, documenting the entire process.

But that's not all. There is a second layer — a string of pi will be broadcast from a satellite and Ishky is working on an app that will track the string of numbers as it wraps around the Earth. Conceptually, I'm a little confused about the "why" of this project, but the images of pi against the blue atmosphere are cool, as is the ability to track the images against a map. Check it out.

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