As a 10-year-old in Switzerland, David Colombini entered a contest. He and a bunch of other youngsters released balloons into the sky to see whose would travel the farthest. Colombini won: His floated all the way into neighboring Austria. Today, Colombini is a designer, and it's hard not to see his latest project as an homage to that childhood memory. It's a machine that sends digital media into the world attached to a huge biodegradable balloon.
Colombini built Attachment as a student project at ECAL, with funds raised on a crowdsourcing site and the help of Robopoly, an electronics and robotics group from partner school EPFL. The process starts at a custom website, Attachment.cc. There, you can enter your name, your email address, a short message, and a favorite image or video clip. The machine prints the message and a unique URL for your content onto a slip of paper, the paper gets put in a tiny biopolymer container, and the container gets attached to a yoga ball-size balloon. At that point, as Colombini's description puts it, "the balloon will travel haphazardly to a potential recipient."
Colombini likes to think of Attachment as a poetic approach to communicating in the digital age. "With technology, everything seems to be under our control and going faster and faster," he says. "Through Attachment, I wanted to use technology to help us rediscover the random and the unexpected." Think of it as a message in a bottle for the age of YouTube.
The machine is still a work in progress (Attachment.cc is temporarily closed for business). For one thing, in its current built, the rig's operation is only 80 percent automated---there still needs to be a human to tie off the balloons. Colombini is considering some changes that might make it fully self-sufficient. He's also looking into the most environmentally friendly options for both the balloon and the containers.
Ultimately, Colombini says he'd love to see Attachment installed in a museum garden or at an outdoor festival, if only temporarily. "I imagine it more as a special performance than a full-time messaging service."
