Tangible Dissonance
Designed as a protest to the space beneath the ramp of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Arts, this installation objectifies the spatial relationships between structural members and inhabitants through sensory techniques that at once verify, question and refute the integrity of the system.
One module of the columnar grid is further subdivided by a 3D grid of light columns, a much lighter grid system which is juxtaposed with the heavy, load-bearing concrete columns. As visitors wander throughout the space, the matrix of lights is activated by their presence, seeming to follow their every move. acting as spatial antagonists, the visitors disrupt the structural grid’s alignment and create a break in the light system, registering various LEDs throughout the matrix to flicker as though the columns of light are losing their supposed structure as well.
The installation is composed of 42 individual concrete cubes which act as bases for the light-emitting plexiglass dowels. The top of the dowels are snapped into wooden connectors which connect the plexiglass to the LEDs. The LEDs, provided by Philips Color Kinetics, are distributed on a lightweight steel cable grid, supported by 4 columns in the space; these four columns represent one structural bay. The project is heightened by the installation into more than one bay, which thus creates more of a dynamic between the visitor and the column itself, the actual structural member. The physical presence of the visitors is detected using a Microsoft Kinect sensor and then processed through Firefly for Grasshopper. Location is then mapped to the space and translated into color variations in the grid.
The final installation was installed in the portico in front of Gund Hall at Harvard University, due to scheduling conflicts.