Haseeb Ahmed

Wind tunnels first appeared in the early 20th century and can now be found all over the world. Their sole function is to make the wind blow uniformly. These tunnels are thresholds for air bound things—things that move through the air (e.g. aircraft), things around which air moves (e.g. skyscrapers), and all things that move air through them to move things through the air (e.g. jet engines)— to pass before they can enter our industrially produced world. They play a critical role in testing our world, and yet, few of us have actually seen the wind tunnels themselves. Calibration ensures that an instrument is measuring the phenomena observed and not merely its own body, and calibration models are essentially tuning forks for wind tunnels. The orrery is composed of a series of wind tunnel calibration models in a scale model of the tunnel itself.