The Sky Factory Vision Statement

We envision a world wherein the pristine beauty of nature is brought inside, where art and technology help to deliver the peace and balance that come from authentic experience of the depths of nature. We are committed to providing practical, affordable ceiling and wall installations that accomplish this in a pure and profound way.

Art, Technology and SkyTiles™

Not just another pretty picture…

It is our opinion that SkyTiles are not just pretty pictures. They are not just innovative or stylish design elements. In the deepest sense, they are not even about the sky.

We like to think that SkyTiles are technology – an artistic technology - whose purpose is to introduce the power and purity of nature into human environments.

In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” John Keats concludes by telling us, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” At the Sky Factory it is our belief that by delivering the full beauty of the sky, we can deliver truth -- the inner truth of nature.

Why are we focused on the beauty of the sky? The sky is humanity’s most universal experience of nature. No matter who we are or where we live, we all see and love the sky. Everyone, in every culture, has experienced lying on their back looking up into clouds floating across a blue canopy. Even our bodies are attuned to the blue of the sky. It is no accident that our eyes and mind register the coolness of blue as distant space. (This is a fundamental principle behind “Impressionism” and bright red stoplights.) It is no accident that “blue sky” is the symbol for freedom and infinite possibilities.

Furthermore, the clouds that inhabit the sky occur in patterns and these patterns are actually exquisite visual expressions of the physical laws of nature that govern fluid dynamics. (We can see these same patterns repeated in the sand at the seashore, the bottom of streams or in large-scale erosion when viewed from high altitudes.) In short, the sky is not only beautiful but also a place where the workings of nature are easily accessed by all of us.

How do we attempt to create beauty that is “truth”? To begin with, a SkyTile installation, like all art, is an illusion. We go to great lengths and use every possible tool to create a hyper-real illusion, an illusion that has the power to elicit our desired outcome - the experience, not of illusion, but of reality. One of our favorite compliments came from a child who, while looking at SkyTiles, asked her dentist, “What do you do when it rains?”

We start by respecting gravity and verticality. (While we love mountains and the seashore, they do not appear above our heads!) We control the perspective of our images so that the sky we place on a ceiling is accurate and properly scaled for the observers, (as if we had cut a hole for the observer to look through.) We use large format photography and high resolution digital scans to insure that our images contain as much real-world information as possible. We use non-reflective surfaces so that the eye and mind are not alerted by reflections to the image’s true two-dimensional photographic nature. In our back-lit installations we work with 6500 K lighting systems that are designed to create uniform luminosity. In pre-press and printing, we carefully control light and color, and in that way express humidity, altitude and even the time of day.

Perhaps our most important tool is composition – we try to emulate the organizing principles used by the great masters to insure that a work of art is self-contained, continually moving and attractive. We carefully select images and place them in the ceiling grid system so that the eye and mind respond by moving, and in that movement experience the full journey, the full truth of the image. This movement of eye and mind is on the surface – from one element to the next – but there is also a movement inward, into the depths of the image and its content. The ultimate “truth” of these natural images is transcendental. Hence, it is our wish to lead the attention of our viewers from the trees and clouds to the formless infinite freedom of blue sky. From this experience of transcendence we hope they emerge refreshed and re-awakened.

In viewing SkyTiles it is this refreshing exposure to nature’s deep mechanics, her truth, and the resulting resonance of that truth with our own individual nature, that delivers the benefit.

The “benefit”, the reason for employing this technology, is to refresh within us the underlying unity that guides life. The value of that is simple. Nature heals. Nature heals our psychology, our physiology and our innermost self.

Does this work? If Keats is right, and if we do our job, we expect a powerful “yes”. To date we do have a growing body of extraordinary subjective reports and now are beginning a program of carefully controlled scientific research monitoring EKG and GSR.

But the real question is, “Does it work for you?” We certainly hope so.

Ó 2003 The Sky Factory