This is not a weather post. Yes, everyone is aware that it’s been chilly in SA lately, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go on about it like a Gautenger in a thunderstorm.
No, this is a post about Linden Gledhill’s DIY snowflake machine and the video he made to Ryan Teague’s track “Cascades”.
And here it is:
Described on YouTube thus:
The movements of a music box ballerina are reinterpreted in a groundbreaking video for British composer Ryan Teague using electromegnetic fields, sub zero temperatures and 2000 volts of electricity.
I saw it here and despite Gledhill being a biochemist (and therefore probably a bit dull), I’m impressed with his homemade snowflake manufacturing process and the somewhat hypnotic video, which:
took months of planning, four days of shooting and roughly two terabytes of photos to animate the growth of hard-to-create ice crystals.
The dancing, contorting trees you see at the beginning of the video are ice structures — most no more than a fraction of a millimetre across — which were grown on the tip of an electrically charged, motorized needle.
Gledhill has previously done some other amazing photographic things with insects and paint; that link to a hugely interesting story of how and why he does what he does.