We woke up at the crack of dawn to start our long journey into the Bernese Alps. I took my Square Wave with me as companions, I wanted to use them as tools for meditation and reflection. A soft cold fog had rolled into the nooks and crannies of the ancient forests of the Haslital; a stoic valley covered in icy peaks and luscious dark green vegetation, at the feet of the famous Eiger and Jungfrau mountains. I could hear the Reichenbach Falls, the location of Sherlock Holmes’ infamous fall, rushing and churning in the distance; its crystalline waters streamed upwards towards its glacial source.
This is where I had spent three years of my life, nestled in the warm wooden chalets of my boarding school, the École D’Humanité. The school had been built by a humanitarian educator named Paul Geheeb. He had a new take on traditional education and valued democracy, community and responsibility as being a necessary part of any school. Some of its more famous alumni include Rajiv Gandhi (The 6th Prime Minister of India) and Hans Zimmer (The score composer for Inception, Gladiator and Dunkirk), who is infamous for having burned down one of the schoolhouses.
We took a 19th-century funicular car up to our first destination. We reached the snow brushed tunnels and began our ascent thousands of meters up. I placed my silver square wave outside my window to watch it dance in the wind. To my surprise, it picked up the stunning reflections of the snow and brittle ice and lit up with diamond-like shimmers.
On my way up to Planplatten a peak just above the Haslital, I sat in the snow and dangled the sculpture in front of me. It produced the same effect, a beautiful shimmering dance of light and silver. After staring into its gleaming swirls I found myself in a trance of relaxation, and utter peace, like slipping into a warm bath. I was fully able to absorb the majesty of the icy giants that surrounded me on all sides.
A little bit of trance is something we need in our everyday lives. Something to remind us to look away from our phones, to think twice about reading a message and appreciate the mysterious and archaic natural world around us. Being a bit sentimental, I can’t help but think that there is something beautiful about bringing a physical representation of the formula found in every natural thing into one of the wildest places on earth. I believe that surely… there must be a metaphor there.
We recently travelled to Zürich to visit the WOW Museum, a centre focused on the fascinating world of optical illusions. Dive into the wow experience by reading about unorthodox and rather ingenious take on mirages. llusions have been an essential part of human culture and history for millennia, the profession of conjuring them is possibly one of the oldest in the…
If you have been to an office at any time in your life, you will have seen them, the simple yet hypnotic metallic toys sitting on the clean edge of a walnut-root desk or brass name tag. For the last few decades Executive Toys have been the gift of choice for the new and highly…
Your Square Wave is ideal for use absolutely everywhere; in fact, we might even go so far as to say there are very few wrong ways to use a Square Wave when it comes to the fun you can have and places you can decorate with it!
Alexander Calder was a 20th-century artist who was one of the forefathers of kinetic art. He was the leading exponent of his time and made sculptures accessible and tactile unlike many of his predecessors. For this reason in his work, art and engineering coexist in perfect harmony, and that balance along with his creative genius…
The philosophy of kinetic art is simplicity; the sculptures should ideally use simplistic designs and color schemes in order to allow the motion and inherent scientific principles of the sculpture to speak for itself.
As the holiday seasons comes knocking on our doors there is and always will be a certain degree of anxiety for those of us left in charge of finding gifts for our loved ones. The qualms of coordinating dozens of gifts leaves us with questions like “how do I make sure to get the best…