In 2009 we embarked on a project to get unique close-up, ground level photographs of African wildlife. To achieve this I built BeetleCam; a remote controlled buggy with a DSLR camera mounted on top. Matt and I travelled to Tanzania and used the buggy to get groundbreaking photographs of elephants and buffalo. However, we lost a camera and BeetleCam was almost destroyed in our only encounter with a lion.
We returned home and published “The Adventures of BeetleCam”. The story quickly went viral, appearing all over the web, in print and on television networks worldwide. However, we weren’t entirely satisfied… just imagine what we could get with a lion-proof BeetleCam!
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde is interested in the ephemeral -- impermanent states of being which he documents through photographs. For Nimbus II, he used a smoke machine, combined with moisture and dramatic lighting to create a hovering indoor cloud in the empty setting of a sixteenth-century chapel in Hoorn, a small town in Holland. “I imagined walking into a museum hall with just empty walls. The place even looked deserted. On the one hand I wanted to create an ominous situation. You could see the cloud as a sign of misfortune. You could also read it as an element out of the Dutch landscape paintings in a physical form in a classical museum hall.”