Portaurora

Fresh on the heels of Tilikum Light, here's another public lightshow thing to go and watch. Portaurora, a soothing aurora-like display at the Portland airport, in Concourse D near the Vic Atiyeh statue. A post on the airport's public art blog (which is a thing that exists) says this was created by Sticky Culture, a "Portland and Amsterdam-based artist team".

Possibly not coincidentally, the airport does have direct flights between Portland and Amsterdam, and the great circle route between the two cities passes over Canada's Baffin Island, southern Greenland, and right across central Iceland. Not far north enough to pass over the northern magnetic pole, but northerly enough that so passengers are bound to see auroras on a fairly regular basis.

An Airport World article talks about the art too -- the article doesn't really tell us anything that isn't in the previous links, but I just sort of enjoy looking at industry trade magazines and websites now and then, and I figured a few readers out there might enjoy it too, so there ya go. I gather that's the exact opposite of what I'm supposed to be doing here, and generates all sorts of negative metrics about how this humble blog is not very "sticky", and visitors may or may not linger around here after reading whatever search result brought them here in the first place. Which I guess I might care about a bit more if I was trying to get you to look at a bunch of ads, which I'm not. Instead here's another Airport World article on the airport's shiny new main terminal and a Designboom article about same.