Midday Wednesday, a team of synchronized skywriters will encircle the Bay Area’s airspace with what, to most viewers, will appear a random string of rapidly fading digits. A select few, however, will recognize it as pi: 3.14159, and so forth a thousand places.
Artist ISHKY devised Pi in the Sky for the Zero1 Biennial, which kicks off today in San Jose. Titled “Seeking Silicon Valley,” the biennial includes a centralized exhibition as well as various public art projects that aim to bring the elusive nature of the valley into focus.
For instance, working on a more down-to-earth scale, San Francisco-based architect Christopher Haas and design studio Rebar teamed up to create Sky-Fi – a canopy of circuitry fibers above downtown San Jose’s SoFA district that will carry pulses of light, metaphorically instantiating the “information superhighway” in physical space.
ISHKY intends to trace the Valley’s reaches in a broader sense: the planes will fly a determined course over Apple, Facebook and Twitter headquarters, The Financial District of San Francisco, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Livermore labs, among other major tech nodes.
With each digit extending a quarter mile in height, Pi in the Sky will be the largest ephemeral art installation to date. And ISHKY isn’t stopping there: part 2 involves launching a satellite into space to orbit the earth, transmitting a constant stream of Pi back down (for more on that, check out ISHKY’s website).
Keep an eye to the skies and tweet/Instagram what you see: #pi, #piinthesky, @ISHKYSTudios. The documentation of this event is in our hands.
The Zero1 Biennial runs from September 12 through December 8, at 439 South 1st Street, San Jose