his semester-long project was in collaboration with Alan Winslow, Pauline Ceraulo, and Sean Zhu. We were tasked with using actual research to create an interactive and educational museum installation.
The project is based on the research entitled “Centennial response of Greenland’s three largest outlet glaciers” by David and Denise Holland of the Courant Institute at NYU and the Center for Global Sea Level Change at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Our installation focus was to introduce the viewer to general topics of how this complex research is conducted through climate models, chaos theory, and tipping points.
Activation 1: Double Pendulum – Demonstrating the fundamentals of chaos theory.
Chaos Theory – What do viewers need to know?
- One action can have a large-scale, snowballing effect on the larger system.
- There are patterns in the chaos that we can use to estimate whether changes/events.
- Glacial melting is a phenomenon closely tied to weather and chaos theory.
To accomplish this, we wanted to use the same fundamental physics examples used in the real world. The double pendulum is a simple pendulum with two arms on it; while a normal pendulum with go back and forth indefinitely (within a vacuum), the double pendulum has a much more complex path. Any small input variation can have cascading and compounding effects on the output path. This is the basis of chaos theory and the same idea can be applied to the complex systems of weather and climate.
The final piece has a battery-powered Arduino attached to each arm of freedom. The Arduino uses an accelerometer to detect orientation and sends the information via Bluetooth to our site, presenting the viewer with their own chaotic system drawing. The viewer can capture the drawing on their phone via a QR code that pops up.
Additional documentation can be accessed here
