At the University of Toronto’s Hart House, seven large blimps hover above students’ heads. The blimps – tied to the ground by delicate strings and filled with lights – was a spectacle to behold at Nuit Blanche on October 1.

Nuit Blanche is an annual night-long celebration of contemporary art with displays, exhibitions and performances occurring across Toronto, including on U of T’s St. George campus.

Led by U of T Engineering student Geoff Frost (EngSci 0T9 + PEY, IBBME MASc candidate), the Solar Blimp Design Team is unveiling an art installation that gave art goers a glimpse of their much larger and ongoing solar-powered blimp design project.

“The project itself is to build a moving ‘airship’ that is powered and navigated using solar energy,” said Frost, who hopes to complete it by the end of the year. “The art installation, on the other hand, is an immobile art piece. But we wanted to do it to involve students, the community, and to expose ourselves – us engineering students – to the world of art.”

The team of about 20 consists of mostly U of T Engineering students, but also includes students from political science at U of T, and architecture from the University of Waterloo.

Members of the Solar Blimp Design Team weren’t the only ones representing U of T Engineering, however. Several blocks away, in the lobby of the Keenan Research Centre, was the “Elephant in the Room.”

Students from the University of Toronto Robotics Association (UTRA) worked with architects to create a three-dimensional celestial elephant. The stars that made up the shape of the elephant were created with approximately 1,000 optical fibres, which were illuminated by proprietary light boxes. The sheer size of the installation meant it was a twinkling success amongst the Nuit Blanche crowd.