Unlimited : designing for the Asia Pacific - Designer Interview
unlimited designing for the Asia Pacific website
Kinetic sculpture in the park - Interactive installation
Experimental designers Keehyun Ahn and Minsoo Lee of AnL Studio are busily creating a giant kinetic sculpture for Brisbane’s South Bank Parklands – the festival hub for Unlimited. At 9m wide x 15m long x 5.5m high, Lightwave is their first interactive sculpture of this scale for a public space and testing is currently underway. It’s unveiled in October 2010 to launch the Unlimited program and remains in the parklands until December.
Their cultural aim with this commission is to start a new conversation about contemporary parks as performative public spaces, by offering a new and unexpected relationship experience between person and object.
From studios in Munich and New York, Keeyhun and Minsoo spoke with Unlimited about Lightwave.
What is the experience you hope to create with Lightwave?
We would like to think that people engage with the piece, not just as a sculpture or an art piece, but as an object they can play and interact with, like a huge toy, or even playmates. It sounds a bit crazy, but we hope it to be like some huge living creature, which people develop a kind of connection with. The concept of Lightwave is about communications and ontology between the ‘creature’ and the ‘inanimate object’. Through the experience of the sculpture we want to provoke the audience to think about two questions: What surrounds you? What do those surroundings mean to you?
How would you describe the Lightwave?
Light Wave has two clusters of seating and circulation space that form the main landscape of the piece. Each cluster is surrounded by clear polycarbonate tubes of differing density, angle and patterning, forming a visually undulated perimeter. Within the tubes are infrared sensors and micro circuitry that detect the motion of passers-by, signaling the programmed lighting responses that are emitted through the tubes.
Is the response mimicry?
No it is not mimicry, but a much more active and changeable response.
Does this work break new ground for you?
In terms of architectural structures, we built a small pavilion-like observation deck (Ocean Scope in South Korea), from steel shipping containers. Lightwave is our second public installation piece. Minsoo has a Masters degree in interactive spatial design, so he has created many indoor-size kinetic installations, but this is the first time application to an architectural-scale outdoors.
Who is working on the project?
We are both working on it together, and collaborating with Rory Nugent and Andy Doro – interactive computer programmers.
What’s the technology that makes it responsive to environment?
We call it physical computing, a system of inputs and responses. Briefly, there are three main components to it:
1) Input / sensing (infrared detection of movement).
2) Computer hardware and custom software (takes data signals from sensors and drives a programmed algorithmic response).
3) Output (LED lighting responses to the input).
How are you testing the Lightwave?
We are doing demonstrations in the studio all the time – all the systems are the same, just on a much smaller scale, so it will be very exciting when we finish the full scale version!