[ISAR] mOCEAN

mOCEAN

 

2004mOcean investigated the phenomenological and constructional possibilities of movement and thick space. It was designed for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Contemporary Extension (SFMOMA CX) summer event, entitled Diamond Dust. The event theme was based on the work and production of Andy Warhol's Factory. Drawing from Warhol's Silver Clouds, the installation attempts to capture ephemeral movement through design and interaction. SFMOMA CX asked that the design form a light source for the large lobby otherwise lit only through spotlights and projections. Though the project's final destination was the museum lobby, mOcean was also shown after its completion at the California College of the Arts (CCA). It therefore developed two identities -- one, a giant luminous chandelier that hovered over the entry at SFMOMA, the other an occupiable 'social space' of sorts suspended just above ground level at the CCA.

 

mOcean employs digital visualization technologies, off the shelf packaging products and fiber optics for its design and construction. Using real-time motion capture technology (MOCAP), commonly used in the animation and gaming industries to precisely map the position of the body moving in space, we derived volumetric paths similar to a digitized three-dimensional Muybridge chronophotograph. The points not only revealed clear movement corridors, they also described nuanced positions of the body. We saw these movements as forming wave-like surfaces based on the head/shoulders, elbows/hips/hands, and knees/ankles. The design developed as an intersection of these overlapping point cloud maps -- paths through space, and wave-like horizontal surfaces. Once fixed, the points were caught in space using end-glow fiber optics hung from aqua-netting with paperclips, and held within translucent inflatable packaging sleeves. Though limited in scale, the design attempts to magnify its perceptual performance by defamiliarizing structural, material and constructional logics.

 

The project also held the constraint of extreme physical temporality -- it was shown for one night only, and needed to be installed and de-installed in a matter of hours. Because of this time limitation, it was built off-site, dismantled, transported, and reassembled on-site the day of the event. Therefore the design research also engages in constructional and material investigations on how to create an architecture for such a transitory condition. The materials choices respond to the strict budget constraints, the necessity for a lightweight, transportable constructional system (the sleeves rapidly inflate, deflate, and can be packed flat), and echo the Pop nature of the event. Fiber optic strand was used as a light source that could work with plastic as it produces no heat. The strands acted structurally as lines from which the sleeves were suspended, and the lighted ends illuminated the plastic material with a soft glow of slowly changing colors. Inflated, the sleeves formed a kind of poche that allowed the movement paths to be voided and made legible, thereby inviting viewers to engage, navigate, and inhabit the volume. And, while this digitized motion is caught and suspended throughout the project, the design also encouraged informal interruptions and random movement produced by wind at SFMOMA, or by moving people at CCA.