Out There – Page 2

Repurposing Old Wind Turbine Blades as Bike Shelters

July 2, 2025December 8, 2024EppuLeave a comment

Apparently, for a good long while, retired wind turbine blades were difficult to deal with. (Sounds like recyclable blades have since been created.) They were made of materials that can’t easily be recycled and are bulky to just dump.

Repurposing used blades has been an obvious solution. But as what? Among others, they’ve been turned into utility poles, playground equipment, bridge girders, and park benches, for example. In addition, in Aalborg, Denmark, sections of old, disused wind turbine blades have been set up as bike shelters.

This is an older project by now, but I thought it clever and worth noting. Also, it’s cool how the shape of the repurposed section nods just a tiny bit towards the Art Nouveau spirit.

Image by Siemens Gamesa, found via World Economic Forum

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Winter Light, Summer Light

June 23, 2025June 15, 2025Erik

One of the things I love so much about living in Finland is the light. In every time of the year, the sunlight is beautiful, but the winter light and the summer light are so different from one another that it can be striking to see.

One day last winter we had a particularly beautiful day of clear skies and sunlight after a big snowstorm. I tramped out in our local woods and took a few pictures of the winter light on the snowy trees. Now that midsummer is here, I went back and took pictures of the same scenes to compare the summer and winter light.

Every season has its own special beauty.

Images by Erik Jensen

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Living Vicariously Through Social Media: Red Lights in the Vatican

May 21, 2025May 10, 2025Eppu1 Comment

In his work, video director, photographer, and art director Aishy plays with color and light. One of his most striking projects is the Red Lights: Vatican series. Interior views from St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City become striking and very different from their everyday state.

Aishy’s work is often described as having a sci-fi or cyberpunk flair. However, what his Vatican photos remind me of is how ancient Mediterranean statues and buildings in their original state were not the bland off-white or grey we currently know, but vibrantly painted.

Instagram Aishy St Peters Basilica Vault

And to get back to the cyberpunk idea: wouldn’t it be more interesting—or at the very least less ubiquitous—if your next dystopia were not visually mostly black or grey, but eyeball-bustingly garish in color? Surely that could also be quite dystopic, right?

There are some specific examples I can think of. The throne room in Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, for starters, looks magnificently arresting. I’m just a little tired of red (or the combination of red and black). Sure, it’s a strong color often linked to strong emotions, but it tends to be overused. How about orange instead, like the Las Vegas of Blade Runner 2049? Or in Jupiter Ascending? Perhaps purple, turquoise, or chartreuse?

Just tone down the use of those ever-present blacks and greys, thanks.

(As a sidenote, the ancestry festival in Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker delighted me for its happy colors, even if the planet itself was another desert.)

Images by Aishy via Instagram: Dome. Vaulted ceiling.

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Ancient Greek Clay Cooker for Multiple Dishes

November 27, 2024August 25, 2024Eppu

Look at this amazing ancient multi-tier clay cooker:

Imgur TheRainbowegoSweet007 Delos Cooker

There seems to be frustratingly little information available online. I haven’t been been able to track down full details for this apparatus, but some sources call it an anthrakia. Considering that anthrakia means ‘a heap of burning coals’ it sounds at least plausible (but as I said I don’t know). Apparently it’s from 500 BCE or so (although one source says 2nd c. BCE), and was found on the island of Delos, Greece.

Delos was one of the most sacred places of ancient Greece—claimed to be the birthplace of Artemis and Apollo—and a busy trade center for centuries if not millenia. It looks like the only images of this cooker come from the Archaeological Museum of Delos. No-one seems to have posted the associated text, though, so I still don’t know quite as much as I’d like.

Such an ingenious arrangement, though, isn’t it? The oven has space for a hand-held grill and an area at the front for raking coals into (I assume). Above the oven, there is an opening to rest a frying pan on. As if that’s not enough, above that to the back of the cooker there are tube-like stands for three cooking pots, through which the pots also have access to heat from the oven. You could have five dishes cooking at the same time. And it looks like the cooker is also portable.

It’s impressive both from the point of view of functionality and design—the oven-stove-grill combo seems to have been made as one piece. (Or possibly two pieces, if the pedestal that looks like an upside-down plant pot was made separately.)

Not bad for a 2,000+ year-old kitchen gadget, right? I can almost hear the sizzling of frying food.

With that, I’ll wish our readers in the U.S. a Happy Thanksgiving! 🙂

Image via TheRainbowegoSweet007 on Imgur

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Theatrical Adaptation of LotR in Tampere

September 27, 2024September 15, 2024Eppu1 Comment

Our fall is forming up to include a bit more J.R.R. Tolkien than usual: besides seeing The Art of John Howe in Tampere, we have tickets to see a theatrical adaptation of Taru sormusten herrasta (The Lord of the Rings)—also in Tampere.

There is a short but handsome trailer:

Taru Sormusten herrasta – Tampereen Teatteri & Tampere-talo by TampereenTeatteriTT on YouTube

(Note: There’s no captioning, and it’s only in Finnish, but mostly the trailer is non-verbal. In the beginning, the text reads Experience the world’s best-known adventure. At the end, while raising his staff Gandal says You cannot pass!)

Tampere Theatre, Tampere Hall, and Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, among others, have worked for four years to create the adaptation. I haven’t heard the reason why the play runs only about two months (Aug 22 to Sept 21, 2024 and Dec 18, 2024 to Jan 11, 2025); you’d think a slightly longer run might be warranted for such a large production. I do know it’s staged at Tampere Hall instead of Tampere Theatre’s own, beautiful historical building because the latter is under renovations. I also know that the production team had to make their own Finnish translation from scratch and that no songs were allowed due to limitations posed by The Tolkien Estate.

The sets and props look fantastic, as does the lighting and video projections. I’m not sure I agree with the Elven costuming, though; their profiles look a little too much like the female Hobbit / villager Hobbit profiles. Otherwise the wardrobe looks fabulous. You can’t tell about the soundscape on the basis of the trailer alone, but I have high hopes. I hope the Hall also works for the adaptation as a performance space.

We can’t wait to see it!

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

The Amazing Colors of an Ancient Perfume Bottle

August 26, 2024March 3, 2024Erik3 Comments

So much of what survives of ancient art has lost the colors it originally held—statues have lost their paint, pigments have faded, textiles have weathered. One of the few materials that holds its color well over time is glass. Just look at this ancient Greek glass perfume bottle and see!

This type of bottle, called an alabastron, was used to store small quantities of valuable liquids like perfumed oil. Like this one, they typically had pointed or rounded bottoms and were kept in wooden or metal stands or hung from loops. The bright colors of this bottle are made from layers of colored glass and gold, bent around one another and blown into shape.

The swirling colors of this bottle almost make me think of 1960s psychedelia. It can be startling to find an ancient object that has kept its color and be reminded that it was created and used in a world that was equally colorful.

Image: Alabastron via Metropolitan Museum of Art (found Greece, currently Metropolitan Museum, New York; 1st c. BCE; glass)

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Light Academia: Love of Optimism, Joy, and Happy Endings

July 24, 2024November 3, 2024Eppu3 Comments

I posted about dark academia about a year ago when I learned of the phenomenon. Time for a sibling post of sorts: since then, I’ve discovered the style light academia.

According to Aesthetics Wiki, light academia favors positive themes in general, “focusing on optimism, sensitivity, joy, gratitude, friendship, motivation, and happy endings.” (Naturally still associated with the love of learning.)

Etsy HeatDigitalClub Watercolor Light Academia Clipart Bundle Sm

Apparently, the term was coined on Tumblr already in 2019. (Man, I must’ve been hanging around the wrong side of Tumblr not to have heard about it then!) Also, apparently cottagecore can overlap with light academia, as can a romanticized view of coffee shops as places for people-watching and studying.

Sounds like neutrals, earthy colors, white, gold, and pastels are especially favored. One article lists movies and shows with light academia aesthetics, including classics like Little Women, but also newer productions like Bridgerton, the 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice or the 2022 Netflix adaptation of Persuasion. There are, of course, playlists and recommended activities or crafts. Some people even sell light academia mystery boxes on online platforms! I’ve found out that there are also other, established flavors I hadn’t heard of before: green academia and chaotic academia.

(Good grief, I feel officially old! At least there doesn’t seem to be any academia cores.)

While I love reading, knowledge, and learning, I confess I’m a little perplexed by this dissecting of various aspects of campus / university life into separate aesthetics. (Not to even mention the fact that Finnish universities by and large look quite different from these Anglo-American-style ones.) But I guess that’s what we humans do—we create endless groupings out of the same elements.

Image: light academia watercolor clipart by Anna Zhar at HeatDigitalClub on Etsy

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

World’s First eVTOL Taxi Is Now on the Market

June 26, 2024April 7, 2024Eppu

According to Reuters, Chinese drone maker E Hang Holdings has started selling an eVTOL taxi on Taobao, a Chinese online shopping platform. EHang was certified for traffic by China’s aviation authority in October 2023.

The model, EH216-S, is an unmanned vehicle with 16 rotors and capacity for two passengers. Its maximum speed is 130 kilometres per hour and range 30 kilometres. It retails for about €300,000 (depending on exchange rates).

At first glance, around 300,000 euros sounds quite steep. Then again, in the U.S. market at least, pickup trucks can go for almost $100,000. That’s not even mentioning exotic cars, sports cars, and other specialized vehicles.

The bottleneck at the moment surely is the combo of safety regulations and pragmatics (the lack of infra). It seems that charging points for electric vechicles are being built so slowly, I cannot imagine what it would take to try and fit the maintenance facilities and parking spaces for flying cars, let alone flying electric cars, into our cities in a larger scale. Plus, what it would take to figure out how, in practice, they would fit into existing traffic patterns. It looks, though, that we might have to resolve those questions sooner than I thought.

Image by EHang