Gallery: Watch a Pyramid of Mirrors Morph Based on Desert Weather
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Babel Tower is the work of Gugo Torelli, a designer from Florence, Italy, and Shirin Abedinirad, an artist from Iran.
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The ziggurat-shaped stack of mirrored boxes sat in the Dasht-e Kavir desert, in central Iran, for a few days last October.
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Sensors, gears, and an Arduino were hidden inside the sculpture.
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As the sensors detected changes in the temperature and the light, the tower’s nine tiers would independently spin around.
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This being the desert, a climate of extremes, the sculpture did a lot of spinning.
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The earthy hues and gradients of the Iranian desert, when reflected in multitudes, create an interesting effect. It’s like you can see the entire landscape at once.
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At other times, looking at Babel Tower is like gazing into a kaleidoscope of the desert landscape.
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“We wanted to give a message of unity,” Torelli says.
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That's where the name of the installation comes from: it's named for the Tower of Babel, from Genesis 11.
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Babel Tower—Torelli and Abedinirad’s version—is still working and intact, but its creators had to remove the installation from the Iranian desert shortly after erecting it. “We are kind of independent artists,” Torelli says. In other words: “We didn’t have any authorization to install it there.”
