''Pi in the Sky'' was an experimental, aerial art display where airplanes spelled out pi to decimal 1,000 places in the sky over the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

. The display took place on September 12, 2012. It was then displayed again in

Austin Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and largest city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 11th-most-populous city ...

on March 13, 2014, during the

SXSW South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Te ...

festival, at which time it was said to be the largest art piece ever displayed in the state of Texas.ISHKY , Berkeleyside
/ref>ISHKY , 2012 ZERO1 Biennial
/ref>

Description

The numbers, each high, were created by a group of five

skywriting Skywriting is the process of using one or more small aircraft, able to expel special smoke during flight, to fly in certain patterns that create writing readable from the ground. These messages can be advertisements, general messages of celebrat ...

airplanes, and appeared as a

dot matrix A dot matrix is a 2-dimensional patterned array, used to represent characters, symbols and images. Most types of modern technology use dot matrices for display of information, including mobile phones, televisions, and printers. The system is al ...

. The string of numbers was produced in a large loop in circumference, at an altitude of approximately . The aircraft used were 1979 Grumman AA-5B Tigers, small, single-engined planes provided by the company AirSign Aerial Advertising, based in Williston, FL. The numbers were produced by spraying natural, burnt-off canola oil, which dissipated, causing no environmental damage. The exhibition began in the skies over San Jose, then continued over Fremont, Hayward,

Oakland Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay A ...

Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California * George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer ...

, San Francisco,

San Bruno San Bruno (Spanish for " St. Bruno") is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States, incorporated in 1914. The population was 43,908 at the 2020 United States Census. The city is between South San Francisco and Millbrae, adjacent to Sa ...

, San Mateo,

Redwood City Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California's Bay Area, approximately south of San Francisco, and northwest of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people to being a po ...

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was estab ...

, and Mountain View. The planes deliberately flew over the headquarters of

NASA Ames The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, and

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

. The 2012 display was part of the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial, was conceived by artist ISHKY, and involved a company called

Stamen Design Stamen is a data visualization design studio based in San Francisco, California. Its clients include National Geographic, Facebook and The Dalai Lama. History Stamen was founded in 2001 by Eric Rodenbeck. In 2003, Michal Migurski joined Stamen a ...

. ZERO1 is an art-technology network based in San Jose. The display was intended to draw attention to their biennial showcase for art and technology. The 2014 display was part of an ongoing project, directed by artist ISHKY (Ben Davis), and again involved AirSign Aerial Advertising. The 2014 display quickly gained publicity making it the number 2 top trending hashtag on Twitter during the display and within 24 hours it was shared and viewed a little over six million times.‘Pi in the sky’ display had people running for their camera , KXAN.com
/ref>

References

External links

Map showing planned route of aircraft

ISHKY website

AirSign website
{{Mathematical art Mathematical artworks Art exhibitions in the United States Art in the San Francisco Bay Area Contemporary art exhibitions Pi 2012 in art

Description

References

Further reading

External links