Launched last year by the New Museum, NEW INC is the first incubator of its kind, a space at the intersection of art, design, and technology. Last week saw the opening of its inaugural “End of Year Showcase,” on view at Red Bull Studios through July 30th. “Snowblind (Life After Architecture)” is one of several projects that is currently on view in the INABA-designed work and exhibition space. Developed by the Principals and Studio Studio, the interactive installation occupies a narrow space as a kind of immersive cloud illuminated by high-powered LEDs that react to visitors.
We had the chance to catch up with “Principal” Drew Seskunas — one of three partners in the multidisciplinary practice — regarding their latest project and the notion of Life After Architecture.
© Drew Gurian
Can you briefly describe the context and brief for the project?
Drew Seskunas: Snowblind came out of a call for collaborations within NEW INC by the New Museum and Red Bull Studios New York. There is a desire in all of our work to close the distance between us and the architecture we inhabit, so it seemed like an interesting challenge to include another studio’s perspective in that search. “Snowblind” is the coalescence of our research and that of Studio Studio into how to close the distance between us and the natural world by creating a space formed from a totally ephemeral structure: the architecture of a cloud.
You describe the piece as “cloud architecture”; what do you mean by that? DS+R’s “Blur Building” comes to mind, though “Snowblind” itself evokes the work of artists like James Turrell or Doug Wheeler …
All three of those are direct influences, as well as work by Olafur Eliasson and Junya Ishigama, which is more focused on scale in reference to the grandiose elements in nature, whereas Snowblind’s “Cloud Architecture” is about connecting the patterns of nature, speaking to basic forces of wonder, and attempting to unite them. “Cloud Architecture,” to us, is a contradiction because the nature of architecture is stasis and the nature of clouds is flux. We use that contradiction as an access point to explore typically inaccessible territories of what architecture could be.
© Drew Seskunas
How does “Snowblind (Life After Architecture)” conceive of architecture as a user’s experience of space as opposed to its traditional definition as the built environment?
The name “Snowblind” comes from a song written by my father about a moment skiing in the backcountry where the snow is falling so hard you lose your line and have to move on instinct. Your consciousness and movement somehow become united with the surroundings despite your inability to perceive them in a traditional sense. “Snowblind” refers to a heightened state of awareness or mindfulness that we evolve into. But, conversely, our architecture has yet to evolve with us. New forms need to be developed to feed our intellectual and inquisitive nature to explore the unknown.
“Snowblind (Life After Architecture)” imagines a life after we have broken free from the traditions of architecture, allowing us to experience an uninhibited space without boundaries, a space of heightened awareness whose structure we know only through instinct. Life After Architecture is active, not passive, [it] responds to your presence by changes in gradient and density.
© The Principals
What challenges did you face in realizing the installation? Is the end result true to your vision?
Prototyping with something ephemeral as clouds has been pretty difficult. People have thought our studio was on fire a few times — the fire department was called more than once — until we figured out how to control turbulent flow of air in our space. Onsite, we faced similar difficulties; air turbulence is such an inexact science, one of the few things where even the most complex calculations still can’t be absolutely determinate. But that indeterminate nature of the material is what we wanted to explore, and the team at Red Bull Studios was very accommodating for such a demanding project (even when four firetrucks were accidentally called). So, yes, absolutely this realization is true to our vision.
© Drew Seskunas
Is the installation scalable? Would you recreate it elsewhere?
“Snowblind” is definitely scalable; like the different types of cloud forms, from smaller cumulous clouds covering your neighborhood to massive sheets of stratocumulus clouds covering entire regions of Earth, this geometry has a scalable nature of planetary size. We will be creating the next version of “Snowblind” at the Aurora Arts Festival in Dallas in October, which, like this version, will also be specific to climate, ecology, and location.
“Snowblind (Life After Architecture)” will be on view at Red Bull Studios through July 30th.