CLOUD

Spring 2016 LA438: Local Energy and New Landscapes, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Team: Grant Penfield Haugen, Sam Randall, Rose Schmillen, Zoey Wang, and Lin Zhu

Project Location: Urbana, IL, USA

This project engages with audience in a shared experience of exploring the natural phenomena of precipitation.

CLOUD began by collecting and freezing Central Illinois rainwater, turning it into ice cubes. At the project’s unveiling in an inside environment, these ice cubes were placed inside CLOUD, with holes punctuated to allow for the precipitation to be released as they melted. During a rainstorm, meteorologists have predictions on the duration, time and force of the water coming down, yet it is still a force of nature without 100% guarantee on any of these conditions. CLOUD related the “discrete” energy source of precipitation to the scale of the everyday experience. The group’s approach to this project prioritized both experience-based understanding of materials and conditions, as well as intuition as a path to innovation. Through humans’ manipulation of precipitation, our group engaged local energy flows in the production of a new landscape.