At times up I am continuing working and developing on our new project called Plastic Souls.
The core idea of Plastic Souls. is the sonification of the plastic waste that floats in the water and is washed upon the beaches. We construct a series floating musical instruments which are entirely made of these ‘adapted’ plastic bottles. The objects are placed in the sea and the waves act as the musician of the instrument, pumping air through the flutes and organ pipes. Thus playing music composed by nature. See previous posts on plastic souls . This work touches on some issues that are of global importance, in addition it is very poetic to observe how it moves on the waves and plays.
I noticed the Amazon rainforest has a program aiming to explore the connection between science, art and the natural environment. for this they have a FLOATING EXPERIMENTAL STATION
A Boat equipped with infrastructure for research and access to coastal communities and aquatic ecosystems. In Linz in the Danube river I am developing a new prototype that should work in the rainforest, A new model that works in a river environment. Meaning harvesting the energy of the current instead of that from the waves. The idea is to build a star shaped vertical axe turbine, that will spin/rotate in the river that way it can play flutes of made of the plastic river waste.
The prototype is made of material that I found at Times up, so a wrecked parasol and transformed in a floating turbine, I used containers that I found to make it spin and to make the flutes.
At the first test when put in the river it did snot pin but the flutes did play.
Only they play by the waves not the spinning, it was to deep in the water and it needed better blades. So we took it out and I made changes to the model.
at the second test it did spin but the flutes were just playing by waves not current for it spins to slow, and it spins to slow because the object was still to heavy and or to big.
My conclusion is: the concept is correct, but I should have build small models and different ones, instead of this single big one. Anyway the parasol was big and beautiful, no regrets. its like a lab you do test to get information, not success, and i know what to do next.
A video and more photo’s @
The times up Blog LOOSE DIARY on this project