Happy Clouds
28-year old London artist Stuart Semple has made lighter-than-air foam smiley faces using a flogo machine. A flogo machine, invented by two special effects inventors in the 1990s, uses glycerin, food dye, and helium, and extrudes the resulting mixture through a die to create floating logos. Semple has used this technology to release one pink-tinted happy face cloud every 7 seconds near the Tate Modern and Bankside walkway in London. The Happy Cloud installation is intended to be a message of hope and positivism in reaction to the gloom of current economic and natural disaster events. ‘I just wanted to make a piece of work that would cheer people up a bit.’ he continued saying, ‘I know at times like this it’s easy to make creativity a low priority, but i want to show that on a very human level an artistic idea might be able to do something important even for a fleeting moment. This was the most straight forward way I could think of to literally contribute something happy to the atmosphere.”
An audience gathers near the Tate Modern to watch the happy clouds float into the air.
click this link to see a video of the Happy Clouds installation.
