In his new book Unintended Beauty, British photographer Alastair Philip Wiper captures the “accidental aesthetics” of the technological revolution near his base in Copenhagen and across the world, finding artistry in research facilities, industrial sites – and the robotics of a sex doll.
Oral sex with a sex robot head built by California-based RealDoll (pictured, above) is not advisable. A regular doll – fully customisable, from nipples to lips and more than ten types of vagina – costs about $7,500 (£5,750), with another $8,000 for the robotic head. “We don’t recommend oral sex,” says founder Matt McMullen. “There are gears in there. I mean you can mess things up. You can mess yourself up.”
The Large Space Simulator – part of the European Space Research and Technology Centre, on the Netherlands coast – is the biggest vacuum chamber in Europe. Opened in 1986, it is capable of accommodating an entire spacecraft, and simulates the conditions of space – chilling down to cryogenic temperatures, and creating a vacuum with a pressure a billion times lower than sea-level atmosphere. An array of powerful lamps, reflected off hundreds of small mirrors (pictured here), reproduces the changeable sunlight encountered in orbit.
Located at the Technical University of Denmark north of Copenhagen, the Radio Anechoic Chamber opened in 1967. Operating with the European Space Agency, it tests, among other things, microwave antennae for use in satellites and mobile networks. The giant foam spikes are filled with carbon and iron to absorb radio waves. This tests the effectiveness of the antennae without any external intrusion – as in space.
Adidas’s Parkland World is a gargantuan shoe factory in Indonesia, 85km from Jarkarta, where 10,000 workers churn out 75,000 pairs a day – more than 22 million a year. Pictured here is the production line for Adidas Superstar shoes.
The Cube is the largest privately owned electro-acoustic measuring facility in the world. Built in Denmark in 1980 by Bang & Olufsen, it provides a space to assess sound quality. This BeoLab 90 loudspeaker has been placed on a computer-controlled platform to move it to and from the microphone, and swivel it 360 degrees. This allows the engineers to measure the sound from the loudspeaker at a precision of one millimetre and one degree of rotation.
Cityringen, a new, driver-less metro line, is the largest building project in Copenhagen since the 1600s (when King Christian IV rebuilt the city). It opened in 2019, at a cost of 25.3 billion kroner (£2.8 billion). Here, a drill head is lowered into a construction shaft for one of the 17 new stations, which can carry 240,000 passengers daily, bringing the daily capacity of the entire system to 460,000. The new line means that 85 per cent of the population of Copenhagen now live within 600 metres of a station.
Vestforbrænding is the largest incineration plant in Denmark. Every day, lorries drop off 1,500 tonnes of waste at the plant in Glostrup, just outside Copenhagen – 20 per cent becomes power for the national grid; 80 per cent is turned into hot water, pumped around Copenhagen and the surrounding area to provide heating.
Opened in 2019 in the Technical University of Denmark, the Poul la Cour Wind Tunnel is one of the biggest university-owned tunnels in the world, allowing turbines to be tested at wind speeds of up to 378km per hour — three times the strength of a hurricane.
ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and Latin for “the way”) is a nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject in Provence, southern France. It aims to establish the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free energy source, based on the principle that powers the Sun and other stars. The EU, the US, Russia, China, India, Japan and South Korea are all members. Construction of the facility is expected to finish in 2021, to be followed by commissioning of the reactor, and the first plasma experiments in 2025. The first ITER image here is of the diagnostics building.
The second ITER image shows the Tokamak Assembly Building, where an 800-tonne tool will pre-assemble some of ITER’s largest components before a crane lifts them into the machine well. The tool’s three columns, arranged in a triangle, are shown on the right side of the image.
