Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Refreshed
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2003 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I'm back from Colorado. The train was excellent, and the scenery beat the band. I took the California Zephyr from Northern California to Denver, then poked around Denver for a bit with Nandini and her friend Matt. Fantastic: the Red Rocks park and ampitheatre. The plane back (Frontier Air) was adequate, and the Denver airport and BART extension to SFO are really cool. They both have neat little subways, and at least one of the public art installations in DIA, "Kinetic Light Air Curtain", blew me away.
"Kinetic Light Air Curtain" consists of a grouping of 5,280 propellers laid out on a grid system that changes from tight to loose configurations as the train passes. The propellers are made of reflective stainless steel and are 12" in diameter. The work, which includes blue fluorescent lighting, encompasses the entire mile of the train tunnel journey. The propellers are activated by physical phenomena already existing in the tunnel, including light from the train and wind generated by the movement of the train.
Incidentally, googling for "denver airport art" or "denver airport public art" gets you a bunch of conspiracy theory about underground military bases, Masonic symbols, and the Queen of England.
