A 45-year old former U.S. Coast Guard apartment block, abandoned since 1996, is perfectly demolished by “implosion” over the course of about 20 seconds. 250 lbs of explosives were used. The 11-story building was removed to make way for a park.
This building on Governor’s Island, near New York City, is going to be imploded tomorrow morning (Sunday, June 9th) around 7:30am, and we at Make have been offered the chance to have someone there to video the event. If you have a good video camera, some mad skillz, and the desire to witness epic destruction, we’d love to have you shoot the event for the Make blog. Drop us a line at editors@makezine.com and we’ll get you connected.
As the artistic duo RoboCoco, Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders explain:
The installation embeds a group of autonomous robots into the walls of a gallery. They punch holes through the walls to inspect what’s outside, signal each other, and conspire. As if the walls had ears and a hammer to pierce holes for their eyes to see. The work develops a political relationship between the stealthy invasion of digital surveillance and urban combat tactics in which soldiers are instructed to walk through private walls. The installation stages this relationship in the form of an autonomous sculptural process that marks and wounds our environment, leaving behind open scars.
Robot uprising jokes are getting a bit stale, I suppose, so I’ll pass on the obvious Terminator allusions this time. Plus this hulking tracked demolition machine from Sweden’s Husqvarna Construction Products is remote controlled, not autonomous, and so is really more a giant R/C car on steroids, with a massive jackhammer arm, than it is a true robot. Still, “awesome” comes to mind. [via BotJunkie]
This is pretty amazing panoramic, full-motion (but unfortunately non-embeddable) video of the controlled demolition of Texas Stadium on the 11th of April shot from inside the stadium itself. [via Geekologie]
