Charles Sowers

Tidal Memory, a new large-scale installation consisting of 24 water-filled glass tubes that show a days tidal history. The columns fill in relation to real-time tide data but as each hour passes one tube gets locked off and continues to display the full-scale tide height at that hour. Eventually all the columns are locked off and show the past 24hours of the tide.

One of my favorite blogs. This post just raised my cool quotient with favorite audience, my 6 year old. We watch videos from the site all the time.

Simple beautiful presentation of inspiring stuff, nice to be included.

I am featured today on the international architecture and design site DEZEEN

I'm featured on the Tinkering Studio Blog: 

Sowers hopes that the exhibit forces people to think more about the world around them and take notice of patterns and processes in nature: “Wind is something most people just don’t think about.

Bay Area instillation artist Charles Sowers has carried the aesthetic of windswept design into another remarkable branching. Watch his “Windswept” installation here.

Sowers has refashioned the façade of San Francisco’s Randall Museum into a windswept display of 612 directional arrows rotating to graphically indicate the relationship between wind and building. On one level, he has transformed the museum’s façade to a lighthearted riot of miniature weather-vanes to perhaps lift the veil of exterior seriousness emanating from much museum architecture. On yet another level, he has brilliantly transformed a building façade into a nature observatory, as sensitive an indicator of wind patterns as desert dunes or shorelines.

At a time when building façades assume the identity of energy-draining, larger-than-life video monitors studded with billboard vulgarity, there’s something aesthetically and sustainably uplifting in Sowers’s windswept, low-tech, permanent instillation. This may not have been what Bob Dylan had in mind when he sang “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” but it seems to mesh with poet Ezra Pound’s poetic claim, “The wind is part of the process.”