We are very excited to be the recipients of one of the 4Culture Tech Specific grants, to be used for an experimental “hypercollaboration”, called the Luminous Garden! Learn more about the Tech Specific program here.
Luminous Garden Layout Mockup
To give you some background, our art group, Recreational Light and Magic (a.k.a. “Totally Legit” as a subsidiary of Totally Legit, LLC), is an interdisciplinary group of artists, technologists, designers, and builders who share a passion for art, technology, and culture. We have created installations ranging from interactive sound and lighting experiences to giant pinball machines, incorporating futuristic themes that challenge traditional artistic boundaries by treating everything as a creative medium. We love lasers, painting, arduinos, culture hacking, totally controlled lighting, giant metal, Kinects, pinball, robots and events.
In collaboration with the nonprofit community tech organization Third Place Technologies (also founded by Shelly Farnham), in June of 2015 we hosted our first Electric Sky.
Over seventy people attended, an unusual mix of Seattlites and Skykomish locals, with about 1/3rd of the attendees being under 18 years of age. We had a 24 hour Creativity Lab, which was a madhouse of electronics, laptops, Arduinos, LEDS, lasers, and 3D printers, mixed with a more traditional array of art supplies. The weather was extremely hot, so people were interspersing time spent on art and tech projects with relaxing moments lounging by the river or roasting marshmellows at the group campfire. To facilitate team formation and community building we started the event with a round of introductions and project pitches, had one large group meal, and finished the event with a show-and-tell guided tour around the finished projects displayed in the ball park.
The event was a resounding success, to the extent Mayor Grider of the Town of Skykomish is endorsing our coming back next year as an officially town sponsored event (assuring preferential treatment in securing reserving the park, etc.).
Although the event was a success, for June of 2016 we wish to double in size and push upon our goal of facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration by framing the creativity lab activities around a hyper-collaboration: an immersive group installation “The Luminous Garden”. We seek to expand people’s conceptions of what it means to do art installations in group shows, which are usually experienced as collections of individual contributions, rather than as one larger collaboration. We also seek to break the boundaries between the artist, the art installation, and the observer by providing an immersive experience — one that really provides the participants with the feeling of being transported into an otherworldly garden biosphere, one with luminous flora and fauna and interactive kinetic sculptures.
Thanks 4Culture for showing your support for this experimental project!