The work of Tom Shannon

Today the objects of desire all come from the fertile imagination of one man - Manhattan based designer/artist Tom Shannon is probably best known for his magnetic/anti gravity sculptures as shown at TED:


However his latest flight of fancy is the video airship

The idea is that vast, spherical video-airships, their frames entirely covered in a matrix of 7 61 million LEDs, their very propulsion systems concealed by advertising, might soon be hovering over the U.S. from sea to shining sea. The Patent Office has awarded a patent on the airships to a N.Y. inventor, Tom Shannon, who has been working on the design, named “Air Genie,” for years.

“It’s a historical development of airships and media,” Shannon said Thursday. “It’s pretty extraordinary, if it gets built.”


The proposed all-glowing neo-dirigible would be 35m in diameter, holding 22,5003 meters of helium, and weigh some 20,000 kg. The 7m LEDs would cost about $36m and add another 1,300 kilos to the airship’s weight — and a need for more than a kilowatt of juice to power them.

Getting it off the drawing board and making it real is the next step.

“I’m trying to put together the financing to build and operate them,” Shannon saud, “Hopefully the patent will help in that regard.”

The airship’s huge size, it turns out, isn’t optional: the weight of the electrical propulsion system hidden within demands an enormous volume of helium—”You can only lift about a kilo per cubic meter”—to provide sufficient lift. Advertisers won’t be disappointed, however: the 3,848 square meters of surface area thus created offers ample space to get a message across.

Air Genie - Tom Shannon from Tom Shannon on Vimeo.

Design means all.......!