Final Project, draft
first concept

REVISION

My ideas are changing, hopefully evolving, every week, every day. Rather than jump to products, let me linger on principles.

I'm an artist. Art encourages society to turn its head toward the things the artist feels are important to notice. That's why I'm learning about niche-market 3-D through Fab Academy.

I'm looking to target audiences that are not normally served by art and tech experiments. I am interested in the rhythm of the interaction ~ rather than excited children and teenagers bopping around, a different rhythm of engagement. The work, whatever it is, will, in the approach to it, set up a rhythm for encountering it. This might be through aesthetics or environment or a combination.

I want the work to combine affect with mechanics, electronics, and connectivity.

I would feel very accomplished if I were able to incorporate a non-didactic narrative into the piece.

The thing needs to reach out some handles of meaning into the world around it, in a way that is more emotive than measuring.

It will be interactive; i.e., used. And it aspires to be nice to look at.

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I am attracted to work that makes space that can be entered, so you feel you are leaving behind the everyday realm and entering a realm with some other possibilities. I am interested in work that offers tactility, that allows you to touch it, that rewards the desire to touch.

from left: Sound Capsule, Little Bits Store interactive wall, both by Daily Tous Les Jours; a Central Saint Martins project

The Idea

I am working on a touchable, mobile, sculptural space whose mode of public interaction will suit old people.

The goal is to prototype a new public art idea. The stuff ~ the product ~ has a point and a program: it is meant to get people to interact in social spaces via a temporary art installation. It is temporary so people will feel some urgency to go and use it. The limited time creates a greater density of interest around the sculptures.

The festival of Santa Eulalia this year in Barcelona brought out thousands for a weekend of light installations and concerts.

The project is inspired by my own experience of limited mobility. In late 2015 I sprained my ankle. It was the first time in my life I experienced physical disability. It affected my capacity to deal with the world in a psychological as well as a physical way. My accident helped me realize the strong connection between what we feel our bodies can do and what we feel we can do as humans in the world. It’s for this reason that I am motivated to make a project that makes a place suitable for old people to be in public space, that privileges their physical way of being ~ which I feel I myself am prematurely inhabiting as I recover.

How do older folks use Parc de la Ciutatella, right outside where I’m living in Barcelona?

What It Looks Like

The project will use a structure that offers a sense of support, of stability. Participants will be cued by lights, words, and sounds to perform slow movements. The participants’ actions relate to the similar structures in the same space. The point is to create a visible system that supports sharing connections in shared space.

The form of the sculptures comes from Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a drawing that demonstrates some of the natural perfect shapes that the body is able to form.


Within the structure, the participant chooses a slow exercise routine corresponding to a circle, a triangle, or a square. Light pads, perhaps, trigger the participant to stretch and reach. The pads stay on for a length of time to ensure a long, slow stretch.


Bruno Munari has done beautiful work cataloguing the possibilities of shapes. There is always the Bucky Ball to consider.

Many sculptures in a park will create a landscape of lit-up, communicating shapes.

Spiral Development

Influences / References