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Seeing the Wind
Fri Feb 11, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Today, wind artist Ned Kahn tells our
correspondent Robin White about how a sculpture can tune you in to the
wind.
One of the windiest places around San Francisco is the international airport. The fog
which beseiges the city in the summertime reaches right to the runways causing travel
delays - and at the edge of the fog are turbulent winds. At a new rapid transit station at
the airport, artist Ned Kahn has put a wind powered sculpture.
Kahn: 200,000 little stainless steel disks – 200,000 things that are all the same and
they're all independent and yet they act in a coherent fashion…
The sculpture comes to life when the San Francisco wind moves the disks. But not all
places are equal for an artist who depends on wind. Kahn did an installation for Bank
of America in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Kahn: All of North Carolina is one of the calmest places in the whole country. It's
basically calm, calm, calm and then a hurricane comes through every once in a
while.
The sculpture is the size of a football field on the side of a building. The day it was
unveiled was as still as can be and the TV cameras went home disappointed. But a
bank executive took Kahn up to his office, which looked over the site from a mile
away.
Kahn: And so he was saying Oh I love this thing. Last Tuesday in the afternoon these
amazing winds came through and he gave me this whole chronicle of the good winds
that had come through in the last couple of weeks and it was great because that's what
I'm after – here's this Bank of America exec and he's completely tuned into whenever
some interesting winds come through.
For the Weather Notebook, I'm Robin White.
Robin White comes to us from San Francisco. The Weather Notebook comes to you
from the Mount Washington Observatory, with help from Subaru, and the National
Science Foundation.
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