About 2 years ago on a blustery Brooklyn winter night, my good friend Dan Paluska said to me flippantly over a beer: hey, how would you hang a couple of thousand LCD glass squares from a ceiling in a big building, so that - you know - they looked cool. I didn’t really take Dan seriously when he asked. Nonetheless, a napkin and a pen came out, some sketches were made, we finished our beers, and I forgot about the conversation.
A few months later, Jeff Lieberman and Dan stopped by, and they sounded a little more serious when they asked the same questions again. This time, we used paper instead of a napkin.
It is now almost 2 years later. Napkin sketches have morphed into CAD models, prototypes, stacks of detailed drawings, boxes full of parts, and 2 semi trucks full of crates. We’re building a 900 square foot sculpture for the new Nature Research Center wing at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. We will be installing it over the course of the next few weeks. I’m going to try and update this tumblr site with images and updates as the story unfolds.
It will be 10 feet wide, 90 feet long, and arc through the bright and sunny atrium building, climbing from an over head height of 20 feet to almost 70 feet. The image above shows one of the early shape sketches for the piece. What is the ribbon? It is a large scale LCD pixelated display, 20 x 180 pixels, showing animations of natural science processes.
Hypersonic Design (Bill Washabaugh, Katie Treidl) did the design, engineering, management, assembly management, installation oversight, etc
Plebian Design (Jeff Lieberman) did the systems engineering and concept design.
SoSo Ltd (Eric Gunther) did the content design and concept design.
Patten Design (James Patten) designed the driving electronics and driving software.
