Clouds
Panorama

Clouds Panorama is a 200-foot long mosaic that depicts a day, from sunrise to sunset through a machine-learned interpretation of the Arizona sky. The work is a portrait of the town of Sahuarita, Arizona. One way to represent a community is to reflect it’s own sense of place and judging from its collective social media feed, a significant part of Sahuarita’s identity is tied to the clear light and dramatic cloud formations of its desert sky.

location

Sahuarita Regonal Library

client

Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona

year

2018

Using machine-learning, Clouds Panorama learns from thousands of images of the sky over Sahuarita. To create the piece, a machine-learning algorithm was trained on a database of sky images. Over time, the algorithm learns to create similar images — new images that look like photographs but are wholly synthetic images imagined by the computer.

200 Foot Pan

Clouds Panorama is a public art installation for the new Sahuarita Regional Library that features a 800 sqft wall-mounted mosaic wrapping the library’s collection rooms. The piece depicts an entire day, from sunrise to sunset through a single blended image of the sky.

PROCESS

The mosaic is made of 1” vitreous glass tiles that are robotically assembled into 1sqft sheets. The sheets were then installed onto 52 panels that tile together to form a continuous image. The change in the color of the sky as the day progresses moves with the visitor around the space.

Recognition

Type

Year

Sahuarita Public Library

Award

2020