The Cyanokites are a suite of five paper kites in the colours of the sky.

The kites are an interpretation of the Cyanometer, an invention of the Swiss scientist and alpinist Horace Bénédict De Saussure to measure the blueness of the sky, the kites are a cyanometer in flight.

The Cyanokites are presently available to wholesale customers only, if you are interested in stocking these for your museum shop, design store or kite event please contact us at wholesale@playgroup.design for further details. Direct to consumer sales will be announced via The Play Group general subscriber email and social media.

The kite spindle is a cyanometer with 52 values of blue.

How blue is your sky?

You sent me a message to say that you had a cyanometer, which got me really excited as I had been researching cyanometers, can you tell me the story and a little bit first hand the experience of it?

I came to my cyanometer by way of friendship. There is this artist I’ve known for more than a decade now, she and I met on a residency at the Banff Centre, located in the Rocky Mountains. Her name is Elise Rasmussen. In her research she came across this Swiss scientist and alpinist, Saussure, he was also a mountaineering enthusiast. She took her research to Switzerland and ended up spending quite a lot of time in the archives pouring over all his old files and equipment and she came across the first ever cyanometer that he ever made. It’s an amazing object. Essentially he has collaged it together, spending a meticulous amount of time cutting out each colour and attaching it to this wheel. I also really like the earlier ones she found as well, and from what I can understand from the markings on the cyanometer, they would fold up almost perfectly so you could fit in your front pocket as a climber.

From what I understand the one that we are all familiar with, the one that is celebrated is actually a second draft. The first one he took up on his first ascent to the top of Mont Blanc, he wasn’t the first person to reach it but he was one of the first. He took up this device and then his son in Chamonix, which is the valley below, he had the same one and they at the same time looked at the sky and when they got back together they compared notes. It was a very observational scientific thing. He was a very curious scientist in that sense that scientists observe and ask questions which is I think how we describe artists. After that he then developed this fifty two graded colour swatch system. Up until this time blue was produced by lapis lazuli, which was an expensive stone, and then de Saussure was so fascinated with this idea of empirically measuring things he used a new invention which was called Berlin Blue, which was an artificial blue, which is a huge deal in terms of pigments, one of the first chemical pigments I think you could say, because he was trying to lock down on the idea of empirically measuring things as a scientific tool. It wasn’t colour for beauty, it was colour to measure the particles in the air. They would then start using colour to measure all sorts of things, beforehand it was just painters then science took the reins of colour. Now as a designer we have very elaborate colour swatches that we use in order to communicate clearly, but this was the turning point I think.

There really was no word for the colour blue. It was called by many other names such as lapis lazuli, ultramarine, pthalio, turquoise, etc. Every understanding of blue that we could ever imagine was always called something else, it was called cyan as well. I spoke to Indigenous colleagues and friends about whether the word blue existed within Indigenous languages. Often, blue wasn’t a word that was used, rather the word was often just a word for water, or sky. So I think it’s interesting that the colour ‘blue’ and even that word was not something that was used in the common lexicon until we needed to name it, or to sell it. Prior to that it was just what was around us, it was the world, in that sense. The word for world is water!

Exactly, it was the air we breathe.

It was all those things, air, water, sky, ocean, river.

There was a lot of symbolism attached in western thought to colours, Goethe thought of blue as darkness. He didn’t think of it as a colour. But his theory of colour, he came up with these theories and it was actually based off the cyanometer because the cyanometer was like a measurement of day to night. It went from white, which was sunlight, through blue into night time. Which makes sense because night is the other side of the atmosphere, behind the blue is darkness, but for Goethe the way he thought of blue was actually an absence, it was just darkness, it was the equivalent of black but not as intense.

At the turn of the last century blue was often seen as something that was hidden, invisible, a crack between something. The blue movies… blue notes, the space between two notes, that resonant distance.

Where is your heart at curatorially?

I’m running a research project at the moment called Blue Assembly. It’s a five year arc that brings together transdisciplinary voices from across the Great Ocean that focuses attention on the watery spaces of our planet, exploring biodiverse environments, human and non-human habitats, and the varied and complex place of the ocean in global cultures. I’ve been dealing with blue, thinking about blue for a really long time. What is interesting is that after years of being in Banff, the colour blue has taken me down this pretty amazing path of research and connection which I didn’t think would be as fruitful as it has been. So much beautiful reading and writing about the colour blue, too many to name. In Banff you are nestled in the middle of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta and many artists who are in residence there would spend a lot of time thinking about the mountains. There’s more bluebird days in Alberta than most of Turtle Island (North America), meaning that the sky is clear because of the altitude. It was just a pretty interesting place to think and look through that.

In terms of Sustainability and the sector is there has been a big shift in the last decade away from only talking about the green, and the importance of blue thinking in interrogating climate policies, how we are understanding the nuances of site and place. The blue meets the green.

Which is fascinating, you know these kites are going to be made in India, I was just reading today how Delhi is suffering in terrible air conditions, dirty skies.

Part of the research for Blue Assembly, it is thinking about how climate is documented historically through art. Because what is interesting is that the moment that Saussure documented Mont Blanc was a specific moment in time, pre acceleration of industry and mass pollution, it’s interesting because blueness isn’t a fixed thing, it’s shifting.

How blue is the sky?

How blue is the sky. Today the sky that I am looking out over the river is a dirty blue, a fallen jacaranda blue. It’s fire season and the winds have started for the summer. It is 33 degrees and it’s hard to focus on the blue.

INSIDE:
5 paper kites (61x53cm)
Cardboard kite spindle cyanometer with 50m cotton string
5 paper tails
Instructions

The Cyanokites are made from tissue paper and are robust and resilient when flying in the sky, but can be susceptible to tears if crashed into the ground. It is useful to have some sticky tape at hand for minor repairs.

Warning: never fly a kite near powerlines or during a storm.

The Cyanokites are presently available to wholesale customers only, if you are interested in stocking these for your museum shop, design store or kite event please contact us at wholesale@playgroup.design (mailto:wholesale@playgroup.design) for further details. Direct to consumer sales will be announced via The Play Group general subscriber email and social media.

The Stingray kites are a suite of 5 paper kites in the shape of stingrays.

The kites are an exploration of convergent evolution in design and biology by drawing attention to the uncanny similarities between the traditional Patang fighter kites of India and the stingray, independently arriving at the same design through incremental optimisation.

The kites are printed in two colours.

Why does a kite from India look so much like a stingray?

I had this idea about stingray kites and I thought it would be really fantastic to speak to a scientist who has a love of marine life. I guess a lot of science is about hypothesis and theory, noticing something and suggesting what the reason for that might be. So i wanted to ask you, why would a kite that has developed in India, in mostly in the desert of the north of India, why would that look a lot like a stingray?

Hydrodynamics, airflow and water flow would have similar properties, if you think about how an aircraft takes off it would be similar for a ray swimming as well. It's more complicated than that but it is the simple properties of moving through air or water.

So the actual body of air and water would behave in a similar fashion? Tthere is a difference in the viscocity of gas verses water, the kites move very quickly...

In terms of lift, for sure. In terms of hydrodynamics, the speed is different.

Do you have a first memory of a stingray?

My first memory would have been when I was a teenager I went with my cousins to Heron Island and I distinctly remember seeing those beautiful stingrays with the bright blue spots on them (Blue Spotted Fantail Ray), my first stingray I'd ever seen. It's a tropical species, they have a beautiful blue iridescence.

Do you have a special affinity with stingrays?

As a collection manager I have a love of everything rather than anything in particular.

The collection is basically a library but instead of books it’s specimens. A huge amount of what we are doing is loans, updating taxonomy, helping to facilitate research, exhibitions, public enquiries. A lot of what we do is identifications for fisheries and public enquiries.

Where we work in the museum it's mostly about taxonomy and systematics, which is describing new species and how they relate. Our work is less hypothesis based and more about functionality and practicality. When we describe a new species we need to know where it fits in the tree of life. Rays and sharks are interesting because they are cartilaginous, they are not bony. so their skeleton is lighter and more flexible for that reason. We are a collection and we have basically everything in all shapes and forms from all parts of the world and all distributions, so when we take people on collection tours one of the basic things we do is we get somebody to look at a fish and you can know where it lives and possibly how it functions in the ecosystem just by looking at the shape. You know that a stingray is flattened so generally they are probably going to live on the bottom, their mouths are on the bottom for stingrays, but not for things like mantas where they don’t live on the bottom, they’re pelagic, they have their mouths on the front and their cephalic fins that help filtering. It’s about thinking about the shape of something and therefore how and where it would live in the ecosystem and what it would be doing. You can see that with most of the true stingrays their mouths are on the bottom so you know they live on the bottom.

The kites also flap the extremity of their sail, almost identically to the way a stingray moves. They are also quite flexible, if they are not flexible they certainly won’t fly. Another parallel is that kites often need a tail to fly, I noticed there is a lot of variation in the shape and length of stingray tails.

Also some tails are just one singular whip, some will have fins as well.

They would help with the same stabilising?

Possible stabilising or adding a little bit more efficiency in swimming potentially, with a fin positioned vertically on the tail it would add propulsion.

There is a term ‘convergent evolution’, perhaps you can describe what that means in science?

An easy way to describe that if you think about a whale shark and a basking shark, they are both big sharks and they both live in the pelagic environment. They are both filter feeders but they are not closely related, so at some point in the tree of life they’ve branched and they’ve evolved the same system completely independently. So clearly it's a functional system that works well in the natural world. That one trait has evolved separately because clearly it is functional in a special niche in the ecosystem.

I find nature a very interesting way to talk about design. Convergent evolution is also present in design in the sense that some things just work, there is a practical outcome eventually. Design is often a lot like evolution because it is the result of civilisations working towards achieving the best possible end, and it is usually to do with efficiency, which i think is similar to biology, the best result out of the least effort. It is definitely the case with kites. The Indian kites are super super simple, they have the absolute minimum of material and I think thats very much to do with an economic imperative. I would suggest that the exact same efficiencies required in animals are what has led to the design of this kite over time. In India, all the kites are basically exactly the same shape.

It's also that independently everything fills a niche. If there is a little vacancy there somebody will take that and will evolve something for that, it is the same in human history too, I guess the kite wasn’t just thought of in India, a lot of countries around the world had a similar thought and had their own ideas.

It seems like every culture has some version of it, it probably comes about from seeing a leaf or feather fall. Stingrays are all over the world right?

And in fresh water, in all waters, there are all sorts of colours and shapes. Species can vary slightly, that is, they don’t look completely uniform. They don’t look exactly the same from the top end of Australia to the bottom end, there may or may not be variation within that.

What are you working on at the moment? Inaturalist?

That’s one of our side projects that we have. It is a citizen science project, building up our knowledge and visibility of fishes, helping people identify them, knowing what we’ve got, changes in distributions…

Is the future bright in terms of species diversity?

It’s always bright for us. There is still a species described as new every week in Australian waters, either new to science or first time it’s been recorded in Australian waters, probably half of those are newly described species for Australia. AH: Australia has more than 5200 species that occur in our waters.

Wow! that must be very exciting to be part of.

How come you decided on fish?

It just had to be, it just had to be, always happier in the water than out of it.