British Airways Unveils "Cloud" at Heathrow

LONDON—British Airways has unveiled a new sculpture to mark the entrance to their first-class lounge at Heathrow Airport’s new Richard Rogers-designed Terminal 5. The work by arts and design practice Troika, entitled Cloud, is a shimmering disco ball of a sculpture created out of 4,638 electronic disks that flip from silver to black under the guidance of a computer program.

The kinetic work, which hangs in the terminal’s atrium, is described by Troika partner Sebastien Noel as “a metaphor for when the airport is very gray and busy until you take off and pass through the cloud layer. With this you pass through the layer of the shopping center, through the escalator arriving into the lounge.” Arguably the work’s real romance, however, lies not in its visual seductiveness but in the clattering sound it makes as the disks flip, which calls to mind the flicker of the ever-updating departures board.

The installation is the latest of British Airways's attempts to increase its contemporary art collection by purchasing works by such artists as Chris Ofili, Peter Doig, Anish Kapoor, Donald Judd, and Tracey Emin, among others. Artwise, a London-based curatorial consultancy, engineered these purchases for the airline, along with similar permanent installations in the Terminal 1 lounge.