Saturday, October 11, 2014

Scorching sculpture

This publicly-funded sculpture was given a place of honor in front of a Calgary recreation center, but has since been removed. A visitor had stepped inside the hollow hemispheres and thumbed a text message to the artwork, as encouraged. But as the artwork was translating the texted characters into a unique light and sound display, it was also focusing a beam of light on the visitor's jacket and began to burn a hole in it. Canadian taxpayers may or may not be out the $559,000 they paid for the piece and rec center president Carol Steiner is not happy about that or the fact that no one foresaw the potential problem. She is a former high school physics teacher and complains, "You put a spherical surface out there in the sun — what did you expect? And what really gets me is they said, ‘We had no idea.’ Really. They should have had an idea. I mean, an elementary physics student, year one, could figure that out, find the focal point of that mirror.”

 

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