The Daily Fix

While walking around this past sunday we came across a new silver-door building with the words “Boiler Room - pierogi 2000″ written on a piece of paper.  I stepped inside.  My mouth dropped at the space inside.  

As you walk in, you’re greeted by a really really large industrial boiler.  Then you walk slightly past to find yourself in a vastly empty room with huge amounts of space above you.

Hanging from the ceiling is a scary doomsday-looking device with flickering blue squares all over it.
It looks like an old World War II underwater mine.
And it looks like it’s about to hit the ground and blow.

Walk up to it and you notice there are hundreds (215) of individual CRT monitors.  Next to each monitor is a CCD camera.  Your screen shows what is on the exact opposite side of the ball, and hence it’s name: The Invisible Sphere.  It’s definitely worth seeing.  Check out the extra photos below:

And also…

Also in the space is an amazing demonstration of the power of solar power by Tavares Strachan entitled “The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want (Arctic Ice Project)”.  Enclosed within a “walk-in” style freezer with plate glass windows, you see a giant block of ice.  This ice was harvested from Alaska over 4 years ago.  Since then, it was transported to the Bermuda Islands, where it sat inside this freezer, and was kept frozen with nothing more than solar power.  The exhibit has moved here, and still, the same thing.  The solar power arrays are on the roof (a video feed proves it) and you can see all of the hardware which converts the sunlight into energy, and an array of backup batteries which store excess energy from the day for the night.  Really clever.  Why the hell doesn’t every building have solar panels yet?  They’re cheap.  On Amazon you can get a home power array for like $1000!  Shit, makes me want to install a grid at my apartment and start selling my extra energy back to ConEd, or just leaving my air conditioner on all the time so I can have my own block of Alaskan ice in my apartment, too with zero ecological footprint!

You can see the exhibit at 191 N. 14th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The Boiler Room