Increasingly, architects who are close to digital culture understand that
spatial design is no longer just about building large, inert static structures,
but a practice in which “hard spaces” coexist with dynamic and
fluid fields or “soft spaces”, which are invisible but define
our experience of space to the same extent as cement and glass: ventilation,
sounds and smells, and even alterations in the electromagnetic space. “Sky
Ear”, the best known project by British artist and designer Usman
Haque, is one of the first ephemeral architectural interventions that exist
simultaneously in electromagnetic and urban space.
“Sky Ear” is a "cloud" formed by a thousand balloons
of hellium containing sensors which respond to changes produced in the Hertzian
fields that the installation encounters on its way, especially those caused
by mobile telephones. When activated, the sensors provoke colour changes
in the LEDs inside the spheres and illuminate them. Spectators can “phone”
the cloud and listen through their earpiece to the sounds produced by natural
phenomena that also affect the spectrum.