Goethe Institute São Paulo and Bungalow Agency invited Niklas and me to give a workshop at the Prototype Festival, which was about art, music and sustainability. Together with the festival audience we created a large, delightful outdoor installation by building a forest of umbrellaphones.

An umbrellaphone consists of colorful umbrellas, which serve as wind generators and drive small music boxes. The operating principle is similar to anemometers used for measuring wind speed. Due to the mechanical concept, the music box in an umbrellaphone spins slowly and produces  occasional pling sounds. But as we built several umbrellaphones in the workshop, they created together an ever-changing random melody that spread across the festival park. To enhance the magical atmosphere, we placed few additional umbrella turbines among the umbrellaphones, which were blowing soap bubbles.

If you want to make an umbrellaphone yourself, have a look at the building plan by Niklas.

The umbrellaphones were also presented in a slightly modified form at the Shine festival in the Netherlands in 2015.

Special thanks to Holger Beier, Valentina Ferrari, Danila Bustamante, Patricia Santilli and Peter Hunziker.