Gas Sculpture - Contemporary Fog Sculptures

Contemporary Fog Sculptures

A large scale use of cold water fog is the Blur Building (2002), an exhibition pavilion built for Swiss Expo.02 on Lake Neuchatel by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro. This is an architecture described as "an inhabitable cloud whirling above a lake", built with an atmosphere of fog surrounding a lightweight tensegrity structure 300 feet long, by 200 feet wide, by 75 feet high. The primary visible building material is water. Water pumped from the lake is filtered and atomized to a fine mist through an array of 31,500 high-pressure nozzles. The nozzle pressures are regulated by a computer processor and a smart weather system that reads temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction. The fog created is thus in constant change, an interplay of natural and man-made forces. Two bridges connect the building with the shore, four hundred visitors at a time can enter the building and be within the fog mass. Inside the fog, one's normal spatial references are lost when immersed within an optical “white-out”, and the “white noise” of hissing nozzles.

Artistic use of steam fog was pioneered in the collaborative Center Beam artwork by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. First shown in 1977 at documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, it included steam works by Joan Brigham, Otto Piene, and Paul Earls. For Center Beam, a low pressure hot water steam fog became a medium to project lasers, holograms, films and text onto.

The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh is planning a new park with a fog sculpture created by Ned Kahn. Set for completion in 2012, the sculpture will be a 30-by-30-foot grid of stainless steel poles outfitted with fog nozzles. Kahn said of the sculpture, "When the fog is on, it will appear like a 20-foot-diameter sphere of fog spinning inside the poles. The mist will be cooled during the summer and warmed in winter."

Other contemporary sculptures in which fog is used as a medium of expression are: Harbor Fog, a viewer responsive artwork in the parkland above Boston's Big Dig highway; Cloud RIngs (2006) by Ned Kahn at the 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky; and the interactive landscape of Dillworth Plaza at Philadelphia City Hall (completion date 2013).