Over at the Adaptive Computing Blog, Trev Harmon writes that an innovative artist named Janet Echelman is using HPC to build amazing floating sculptures.
She builds and installs some of the most beautiful and permanent outdoor installations to be found anywhere. This is because her installations are made of a special netting that flows and billows with the wind, yet is strong and stable enough to weather the forces of nature year round. In 2011, Janet explained her journey to creating such lovely sculptures in her TED talk, seen now by over 1.2 million people around the world. I invite you to become one of them.
I couldn’t build this with a steel ring, the way I knew,” said Echelman. “Its shape was too complex now. So I replaced the metal armature with a soft, fine mesh of a fiber 15 times stronger than steel. The sculpture could now be entirely soft, which made it so light it could tie in to existing buildings — literally becoming part of the fabric of the city. There was no software that could extrude these complex net forms and model them with gravity. So we had to create it.”
After seeing this video, I have to agree HPC does matter–in Engineering,
Chemistry, Physics and yes, even Art.
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