Up close, nature’s patterns represent nothing so much as elegant geometry, or even, perhaps, pixels. Rendered as an translucent array, organic patterns become a dance of digital pixels in a work in North Carolina. The creators describe it nicely, so it’s best to reflect on their description – and recall that nature can be an endless source of inspiration.
There’s an extra revelation here, too: low-power displays could be the future. And that’s excellent news for nature.
Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for the newly-built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibit celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.
10 feet wide and 90 feet in length, this sculptural ribbon winds through the five story atrium of the museum and is made of 3600 tiles of LCD glass. It runs on roughly 75 watts, less power than a laptop computer. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.
The content cycles through twenty programs, ranging from clouds to rain drops to colonies of bacteria to flocking birds to geese to cuttlefish skin to pulsating black holes. The animations were created through a combination of algorithmic software modeling of natural phenomena and compositing of actual footage.
An eight channel soundtrack accompanies the animations on the ribbon, giving visitors clues to the identity of the pixelated movements. In addition, two screens show high resolution imagery and text revealing the content on the ribbon at any moment.
Patterned by Nature was created by
Plebian Design – plebiandesign.com
Hypersonic Design & Engineering – hypersoniced.com
and
Sosolimited – sosolimited.com
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