Light Up the Skies
When two artists with different aesthetic backgrounds collaborate, they often create stunning pieces, and the collaboration between artist’s Aaron Koblin and Janet Echelman is no exception.
Janet Echelman, who has been featured already on Art & Science Journal, creates fishnet-like aerial sculptures that look as if they were floating entities in the sky. The nets’ shapes are manipulated to form anything from funnels to winged creatures. Aaron Koblin is an artist and designer who focuses on data and digital technologies, how this information relates to cultural trends and how people react to changing technologies.
These artists collaborated together on March 15, 2014 at TED 2014 to create “Skies Painted with Unnumbered Sparks” outside the Vancouver Convention Centre where the TED talks were being held. TED is integral to this installation, as the two artists met at TED 2011 after their talks. In order to make such an installation possible, Echelman needed the expertise of Autodesk, a 3D design engineering software that specializes in working with interesting design problems. The amazing feature about this outdoor installation is that passersby can choreograph the lights on the web with their smartphones, controlling the aesthetic nature of the piece through technology.
If you would like to see how a sculpture of this magnitude was imagined, and then installed, TED blog has a ‘making-of’ gallery.
The installation will be up in Vancouver until the 22nd of March, 2014.
-Anna Paluch
