Tech & Biz

Solar Powered Wi-Fi Flowers Light Up U.S.

by LarryDeezell | September 17, 2009 at 01:28 pm

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Patrick Shearn and Cynthia Washburn, a couple of Los Angeles artists have teamed up and are a part of a campaign for Toyota's newest generation Prius. The project is called Prius Solar Flower Lounge and managed by Saatchi & Saatchi LA, in the day time, it's bright with colours and in the night time, its lit up with LEDs. The flowers have been touring the States for a few weeks now.

According to John Lisko, the executive communications director for Saatchi & Saatchi, Toyota's ad agency on the project, the flowers have gone through Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, and will shortly be departing for Los Angeles

Toyota has commisioned the Poetic Kinetic project for the theme of the new Prius, a relationship between man nature and machine. Shearn had built the mobile flowers for Burning Man in 2005 and 2006.

Run on solar power, the flowers pull in an Internet signal via a 3G network, explained Washburn, and then convert it to Wi-Fi, which covers a radius of about 200 feet around each flower

The Poetic Kinetic's project is just temporary art, but Toyota is thinking of making a permanent version of flowers because of the positive feedback from by-standers.

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Cynthia Washburn (not verified)

at 10:49 on September 18th, 2009

Thank you, NowPublic, for the post!A point of clarification: Poetic Kinetics is the company that designed and built the flowers (Patrick and Cynthia are co-founders), and the project itself is called "Prius Solar Flower Lounge", initiated and managed by Saatchi & Saatchi LA.