Artist Leo Villareal was commissioned to design a video-projection environment to travel with a music festival. The room had to accommodate an audience in an immersive environment and equipment , and it had to be disassembled and reassembled quickly by tour staff. MESH collaborated on the design of the design of a bolted-strut-frame box with acrylic panels.
This was an entry in a design competition sponsored by the van Alen Institute and Theater Development Fund. How can we expand the role of tkts in a new building, with intense activity during limited hours and its prominent location in the center of Times Square? Accommodate selling functions in transparent volumes that allow connection to the environment while separating activities. The tkts pavilion doesn’t just sell tickets. It becomes a device to redirect energy of Times Square out over the Internet. This project would establish tkts2k.net as a direct link to the spectacle of Times Square and the world of Broadway shows by connecting a network of Times Square, Broadway theaters, and people worldwide. The result is a grand, 24-hour global theater to project the life of Times Square. The translucent boxes are constructed of self-supporting sandwich panels and the electronic mantle is fiberglass. The mantle opens during selling hours to expose ticket windows & closes at other times to expose only the tkts2k.net interface.
Crossing Borders was an exhibition of exquisite medieval manuscripts at The Jewish Museum. MESH designed the exhibition plan, the custom steel, walnut, and acrylic vitrines, the lighting, the graphics (with Karlsson Wilker), and the web site (http://bodleian.thejewishmuseum.org). The material embodies the crossing over of cultural influences among Jews, Muslims, and Christians at a rare time of relative harmony among the European religions. To show other pages of the manuscripts in addition to the ones on display, we designed iPads to be flush-mounted in the vitrines, right next to the actual manuscript. The iPad resolution is astonishing and holds its own alonside the original. And as the pre-eminent form of the book today, the iPad presents a satisfying way to experience a thousand-year-old book – intimate, tactile. The museum commissioned a full photo capture of the Kennicott Bible, and the entire 922 pages are viewable on 5 iPads in the show. Instead of arranging the vitrines around the room, as in a traditional layout, MESH installed over sized, double-sided vitrines in the middle of each gallery. This layout directs visitors to gather around the vitrines for a more communal experience where we are aware of both the objects on display and our fellow visitors. The lighting of the manuscripts is a unique process invented by MESH. We hung compact, LED-based media projectors above each vitrine. Through a careful process, documented in a video on Vimeo.com, MESH created a masking image for each projector that trims the light precisely to the shapes of the objects and labels. The stark contrast makes the requisite low light levels appear brighter, using LED light assures that no UV rays can damage the manuscripts, and the manuscripts assume a glowing aura that draws us in to each one.
Launched in Rockefeller Plaza and proceeding to a multi-city tour, this booth represents the new standard for the advertising industry, focused on consumer participation. Visitors enter the booth to record video testimony of their experiences flying JetBlue. The best stories are used in TV commercials and on the Web. The booth incorporates a full LED video display, LED-backlit composite graphic panel sides, and a full interactive, chromakey video recording system.
This exhibition at White Columns, a New York galley space, explored the dissolving boundaries between the synthetic and organic through the creation of immersive installations within a large scale inflatable structure. Each work in synth feels “active” and seemingly “alive” but in reality has been created synthetically through the use of computer technology. MESH collaborated with organizer Leo Villareal on the exhibition and designed environments for two of the rooms housing interactive, projected installations. Two “synth chairs” represented an inversion of a chaise lounge, which supports the player of a networked video game in a forward-leaning, active position, in contrast to the slouch familiar to sofa-based gamers.
This pavilion was originally installed in the temporary WTC PATH station. It was designed to be disassembled and re-installed in Foley Square without damaging components or wasting materials.
StoryCorps, modeled after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930’s, through which oral-history interviews with everyday Americans across the country were recorded, is a national project to instruct and inspire people to record each others’ stories in sound. Mesh conceived a soundproof, mobile recording studio. It appears bright and engineered on the outside to let you know it is technologically advanced, packed with digital equipment. But the inside is warm, almost domestic in tone to help interlocutors feel comfortable. The outside is also a display, telling StoryCorps’s story and inviting passersby to listen to some of the stories.
On the occasion of the randomaccessmemory.org launch, MESH created a physical interface to the RAM database, to encourage an experience with the data different from that at home using the web. What makes a space feel different, expanded, connected to someplace else? What if we have to physically move to find different data? How does that change our perception of the space? There are thousands of stories within, powerful true accounts from peoples memories. In the sliding screen interface you can click a word on the touchscreen to find memories containing that word. The memories are retrieved and laid out chronologically and virtually along the 20ft track, which you browse by walking. We display the memories not as paragraphs as on the site, but through RSVP, a method of displaying text sequentially, one word at a time. The words flash, but if you stop and focus on one of the streams, cognition clicks, and suddenly you enter another space created by the story. Perhaps this inspires recall of your own memories, after all much of the interest is in association, what causes us to store and retrieve. In the back you relax and enter your own memories at the suspended memory bench. There are links between the site and the show, the most recent memory from the Web is shown on screen, and a recent webcam photo is on the web site. The canopy is illuminated by color-changing LEDs. Three layers of images: cyan=places, magenta=people, yellow=objects. Images fade in and out of visibility as the lights crossfade, creating an animated, atmospheric backdrop and shelter. The structure does not touch the ground. Everything is suspended, with 12 bolts anchoring the struts into the walls on the gallery side. The other ends of the struts rest against the building, so the entire structure is effectively wedged between the two buildings, hanging the tracks and benches.