Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Subway stations are great places for art, commissioned or otherwise. The anxieties of a bustling platform, the boredom of waiting for a delayed train, or even the drudgery of another day’s commute–all can be soothed, or at least temporarily smoothed over, by a well-placed placard with something nice to look at. Renowned artist Mark Wallinger recently finished a new collection of soon-to-be-subterranean pieces to celebrate the London Underground’s 150th anniversary, though their subject matter is somewhat at odds with the whole idea behind these modern marvels of efficiency in the first place. By the end of this summer, at every one of London’s 270 Tube stations, passengers will be able to take a few seconds to contemplate a tiny maze.

The project is part of the ongoing Art on the Underground program, and it’s the largest-ever commission of its kind. For the full set, Wallinger created 270 different labyrinths, one for every stop. The first 10 of the series are being installed this week; the rest will follow in coming months. Once they’re up, each two-foot-by-two-foot piece will be a permanent part of the station in which it’s posted.

“The journeys we take on the Underground are unique to each of us,” Wallinger said in a statement accompanying the project’s debut. “I hope Labyrinth can perhaps reflect that individual yet universal experience.” And in a sense, the maze is the perfect thing to capture that dynamic. Each will be instantly recognizable as such–like the ones you’ll find in any kids’ activity book, they’re nothing more than ordered clusters of black and white lines–though every passerby will have the opportunity to navigate the lines on their own, be it superficially, from a distance, or up-close, scrupulously following their path with a finger.

From the initial pieces, it seems like some will be easier to complete than others. The puzzle for Embankment station is a straightforward spiral to the center. The thin-lined Oxford Circus labyrinth offers a significantly greater challenge, with some potential wrong turns and dead ends thrown into the mix. But for all the pieces, the magic only exists so long as the works stay pristine. Hopefully, the city’s transportation officials have a plan for dealing with the inevitable product of the first drunken ass who happens to encounter one of these with a Sharpie.

It’s always struck me as fitting that Koolhaas has never built a freestanding building in New York (despite the fact that it was his ideas about Manhattan that launched him to fame in the late 1970s); it’s as though his vision of the city is just a bit too far ahead of schedule for the rest of us.

The 30-year dry streak was reconfirmed this fall, when OMA’s proposal for a 41-story tower at 425 Park Avenue was put aside for a Foster + Partners design. The decision was not altogether unsurprising: Foster has a proven track record as the architect of two of the city’s biggest office towers of the past decade.

But it’s still worth noting OMA’s design, if only for what it says about Koolhaas’s evolving ideas about the city. Luckily, thanks to the developer’s (very rare) decision to videotape and upload footage of the competition pitches, we get it straight from the horse’s mouth: A YouTube video shows Koolhaas hunched over a laptop presenting the design to developer David Levinson.

“I wanted to think about New York as though there had been a plan,” Koolhaas begins. “Europeans write manifestos and never realize them, in New York, things are realized without any kind of plan.” (Indeed, Koolhaas has called his seminal book Delirious New York a “manifesto” for Manhattan.) The grand plan, in this case, is the grid extended from Central Park down to Times Square. The site at 425 Park is torn between the two poles of Central Park (ten blocks north) and Midtown (a few blocks south). Imagining the 650,000-square-foot volume being pulled in either direction, the OMA team gently torqued the structure until the facade began to vortex. It’s an incredibly elementary–and subversive–move: amidst a tightly regulated north/south framework, the building twists and shimmies like a dancer.

The resulting “Brancusi-like” tower looks almost organic–not at all what you might expect from OMA, which might have worked against them. Inside, though, there are more details that deserve mentioning. In particular, the decision to create a thin vertical atrium through the first 15 floors of the building, connecting the lobby to a public atrium above. Small footbridges sprout from all sides of the chasm, creating what you’d imagine to be a cacophonous space of intersecting companies, events, and spaces. It’s what Foucault calls a heterotopia, a space that is neither here nor there, inviting social interactions that are unplanned. Koolhaas called these kinds of spaces “architectural mutations” in Delirious New York–like mushrooms, they pop up in the dark corners and crevices of the city.

This proposal, like so many other OMA plans for Manhattan, has been put aside for Foster’s clean, middle-of-the-road technocratic vision of the future. But the doomed design is still a fascinating look into how Koolhaas conceives of a city that’s changed rapidly since he wrote about it in 1978.

H/t Design Boom

The American system of higher education has long been the envy of foreign onlookers — that’s why the governments of many countries are inviting U.S. universities to open satellite campuses in their centers for higher learning, in hopes of adopting some of the U.S.’s best home-grown practices.

But it’s not just the foreign countries who benefit from the deal. In what the New York Times called an “educational gold rush,” U.S. universities are rushing to claim their turf in cities across the Middle East, East Asia and India.

Where these two aligning interests come together is at education hubs, such as Doha, Qatar’s Education City. When most people think of the Persian Gulf states, things like oil tycoons, casinos and over-the-top hotels come to mind. However, the government of Qatar has taken enormous strides to present the capital city as a regional center for education and research, as the home of the 14-acre hub of universities located on the city’s outskirts.

At Doha’s Education City, students from all around the Arab world can receive medical degrees from Cornell, computer science degrees from Carnegie Mellon, or journalism degrees from Northwestern, without the culture shock of moving, or the post-9/11 fight for a visa facing many Arabs who hope to study or work in the U.S.

Education City, an initiative of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, is home to some nine institutions of higher education, as well as primary and secondary schools. The campus is the brainchild of Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, who had the idea to bring branches of several leading universities to a unified campus in Qatar, the first of which opened in 1998.

With regional advancement in mind, Education City was developed to teach students the skills considered critically important by the Gulf Cooperation Council, as well as a place where university researchers can build relationships with public and private sector colleagues.

The campus includes schools from six U.S. universities — Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar School of the Arts, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, and Northwestern University in Qatar — École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC), the University College of London Qatar and Qatar’s Faculty of Islamic Studies.

But what’s in it for the U.S. universities? The opportunity to get ahead on the burgeoning trend of campus internationalization.

“Sometimes people ask: Why is Northwestern University in Qatar and not in China or India, for example,” Northwestern University in Qatar Dean Everette E. Dennis said in an interview upon the graduation of the school’s first class in May of this year. “Part of the answer is: Because Qatar’s leaders asked us to come. There was an invitation extended, and a determination was made that this had value for the University.”

The rise in opening overseas branches reflects a shift from sending students to semesters abroad or swapping faculty on research exchanges. Just as Dennis described Northwestern’s decision to open in Qatar because of the government’s invitation, so was New York University lured into opening its satellite campus in Abu Dhabi by a $50 million gift from investor Omar Saif Ghobash, according to the Times.

Collaborative urban research hubs are not unique to the Middle East. New York City approved plans in December 2011 to build a graduate campus for technology on Roosevelt Island, Cornell NYC Tech. The campus will be a partnership between Cornell University, which has its main campus in Ithaca, N.Y., and Haifa, Israel’s Technion Institute.

“We believe this new land grant can help dreamers and entrepreneurs from around the world come to New York and help us become the world’s leading city for technological innovation,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when the campus was announced.

The city gave the university $100 million and a grant of city-owned land to help spur the $2 billion project, which will eventually facilitate 2,500 students. Beginning in Spring 2013, graduate engineering classes will be taught in a temporary location until the Roosevelt Island campus is complete.

How do you think cities can best facilitate education? Let us know what cities have to gain when they become education hubs in the comments.

Images courtesy of Flickr, Clint Tseng

Billboards don’t add much to the urban environment besides visual pollution and a sense of clutter. Maybe that’s just because we’re not utilizing them correctly. If billboards could feature aerial bamboo gardens and Wi-Fi connected climate monitoring systems instead of advertisements, they’d be a lot more palatable.

That’s what Los Angeles sculptor Stephen Glassman wants to do with the Urban Air “global art-in-public” project. Glassman has long worked with bamboo. In the early 1990s, he put up large bamboo installations in L.A. neighborhoods affected by the Northridge earthquake, Malibu fires, and Rodney King riots. He soon realized that the metal billboards surrounding L.A. seemed to be impervious to disaster.

His vision: installing planters, bamboo, and sensors that keep track of air quality and temperature into Los Angeles billboard spaces. The result, he believes, would transform “the steel and wood of outdoor advertising into the infrastructure of urban sustainability in cities around the globe–actively, publicly, and collectively generating a green global future,” according to the Urban Air Kickstarter page.

The Urban Air project isn’t a pipe dream. Glassman has partnered with billboard company Summit Media and engineering firm Arup to help bring the idea to fruition. Summit is even donating billboards along major thoroughfares in the city to the artist.

Here’s how the system works: Participating billboards lose their commercial facades, which are replaced by planters containing bamboo trees. Water misters are mounted on the structure to create what Arup calls “a cloud forest in the sky.” Wireless sensors keep track of environmental conditions–even how the Urban Air installation is affecting the surrounding microclimate–and the results can be made available to the public. As a bonus, the billboards could even combat the urban heat island effect (where city surfaces absorb solar radiation and store heat) thanks to the bamboo, which provides natural cooling.

Urban Air has raised just over $8,500 at the time of writing; the project is aiming to raise $100,000 over the next month. If it’s funded, at least one prototype billboard in L.A. will get a bamboo makeover.

Imagine you are Taylor Grey Meyer and you have worked very hard on acquiring a future in the business of sports. You started at age 15 by volunteering at a minor league team. You’ve interned at a national league team. You’ve acquired a degree in sports commerce and you’re on your way to a law degree. You move to the city where you’d love to work and you send no fewer than 30 resumes in for various roles, eventually dropping into the “entry level” category, just in case. They reject you there, too.

And then you get a letter asking you if you want to PAY for a camp that will teach you more about the sports business from the very same organization.

That’s exactly what happened.

The Article Above Is Required Reading Before We Talk Further

If you skipped over that link, you should read it and then come back. It’s okay. I’ll wait.

What’s interesting to me is that most people’s reactions were in the vein of “I wouldn’t hire her” and “Oh, she just burned all her bridges.” I’m stuck. Because I understand how it’s not professional to ask prospective employers to suck one’s dick (doubly interesting because Taylor’s a female), but I also know that she must be so frustrated, and that by pointing out all her qualifications, it’s even more obvious that she’d had enough.

To me, she’s got a lot of guts and character and she’s clearly passionate. She just found the end of her rope is all. But that’s the real question, isn’t it?

Would You Hire This Person?

Most people disqualified her because she lost her cool. Others disqualified her because she cursed. Me? I think her only sin is that she kept trying to send resumes instead of looking for another way to land the role she sought. To me, the problem isn’t that she’s ballsy, not that she swore, but that she wasn’t inventive enough to try something other than mailing pieces of paper and/or pixels to a company that was ignoring her.

Have you tried everything to get where you want to go? The answer is almost always no. We have such creative brains, and yet, we forget to use them when we get stuck in the Matrix of what is “typical.”

I’m not counting Taylor Grey Meyer out, but I’m definitely saying she is invited to get a lot more creative with her attempts to find a sports organization worthy of her qualifications and talents.

What say you?

Kim, who is finishing is degree at Art Center College of Design, had three days to carry the project through from concept to completion.

Ideas, sketches, and notes tacked on the wall of Kim’s studio show the evolution of his proposal.

A comparison of “the big three,” Apple, Google, and Microsoft. “I decided that Microsoft needs to be… slightly aggressive, unlike Apple and Google’s friendly marketing,” writes Kim.

Microsoft’s current logomark.

Kim’s proposed redesign changes the typeface to an uncapitalized sans-serif, with a well-adjusted kerning.

It’s a “new start,” writes Kim, whose visual identity appropriates outer space imagery in stark black and white.

How the current logo works with Microsoft’s diversified product lines was a major concern for the young designer, who thinks that the perspective angle of the current logo clashes when it’s stamped on hand-held products.

On the left, Kim points out some of the company’s newest, coolest products. On the right, their over-friendly branding for Microsoft Office–”a branding effort that simply does not inspire people.”

The centerpiece of Kim’s proposal is the new logo, which he calls “the slate.” It was inspired by the oblique perspective of windows in corporate office towers.

Adapting the slate for the company’s many product lines, from tablets to software, shows its flexibility.

Meanwhile, a super-sized version frames a re-written brand philosophy:
“The Next Microsoft is built around a belief and passion for the future…expressed in a bold and mysterious fashion.”

The slate becomes a window pane, like Microsoft’s past logos, which can be super-sized to frame the “mysterious” imagery Kim sees as essential.

Another iteration of the slate shows crowded city streets.

And a third, the city itself.

Stamped on a Surface tablet and Windows phone, the slate is a less “busy” visual identity.

Which also extends to Microsoft’s packaging. Here, boxes for the company’s newly-unveiled line of tablets.

Kim demonstrates that the slate could be a ubiquitous presence in the multi-armed corporation, fading into the background at any scale.

Again, we see how Kim has imagined the new logo adapting to Microsoft’s various brand families.

He’s even reimagined print ads–here, we see a full-page spread (or billboard?) for the Surface tablet.

The designer thinks the brand isn’t properly conveying the excitement and vision of their new products–here, he redesigns an ad for the Windows phone.

The same goes for the company’s newest iterations of desktop software, from Office to the Windows app store.

Yes, the slate has even colonized a Manhattan billboard, one of the areas in which Apple has done such an excellent job marketing their brand.

A “loading” screen shows the slate being filled in, while the Windows phone loads.

Here’s how Kim explains the differences between Apple, Google, and Windows UI. On the left, Apple’s interfaces rely heavily on “skeuomorphics,” or design details that make it seem old, worn, and familiar. On the far right, Microsoft is the opposite, with a purely digital interface. In the middle, Google is somewhere in between.

Kim seems to be a fan of Microsoft’s Metro UI language, but he has a few bones to pick. For example, the current super-bright color palette makes certain things tough to read. He proposes a more somber alternative.

As to the “pure digital” UI, Kim appreciates the notion, but argues that it makes certain apps illegible, like the Wallet app. Here, he introduces a few design “metaphors” to increase legibility.

Kim sees his proposal as a way to make good on the company’s history as an innovator. “Microsoft: A promise made, a promise kept.”

WHY YOU SHOULD START A COMPANY IN…

New Ideas, New Markets, New Insights

It used to be, if you were serious about starting a tech company, you went to Silicon Valley. But emerging entrepreneurial hubs around the country are giving startups new options. In this series, we talk to leading figures in those communities about what makes them tick.

CLICK HERE for hotbeds of innovation in other U.S. cities.

To most people, Nashville is a one-note town: Music City, home of the American country scene. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Liza Massey, president and CEO of the Nashville Technology Council. “It’s great because it shows we have a creative, vibrant community.” But now another type of creative professional is stepping into the spotlight: the tech entrepreneur. Not only have the big technology leaders like Microsoft, Dell, and HP come to town, but frisky social media startups such as Emma, Moontoast, and Populr, are sprouting up here, too. Plus, there’s a burgeoning healthcare industry with high-tech needs. Which poses one of the best problems a city can have: Nashville now has 1,200 vacant tech jobs and not enough qualified workers to fill them.

So the city’s Technology Council has launched Nashville Is Hiring, a massive recruiting campaign that uses strategies both conventional (partnering with community colleges) and decidedly unconventional (going after middle school kids) in hopes of filling those jobs and starting a larger conversation around how to make Nashville a great place for tech workers. It is one of the Council’s several initiatives, which move beyond the “great quality of life” pitch and work toward making real grass-roots change with job candidates, educational institutions, and employers.

You might be wondering: Why so many jobs to fill? Well, for one, business is good. “The city has become so good at attracting and starting businesses that we’ve actually weathered the recession quite well,” Massey says. “I get pulled into meetings all the time with companies who are looking to expand and all they want to work on is tech workforce.”

The real problem is that while it’s easy to sell families on Nashville–the city has great schools, affordable housing, and no state income tax–it’s a lot harder to lure recent graduates. Employers aren’t always offering the hip, culture-driven workplace that young creatives seek.

The Technology Council wants to help employers understand that the young, recently graduated tech workforce is looking for a very different kind of work environment. “We have to tell students that you’re not going to be Dilbert in a cubicle, you’ll have flexible hours, and you’ll be able to work from home,” Massey says. Massey and her team encourage that structure by pointing companies to the postive aspects of ROWE, or results-only working environment, the kind of ethos pioneered by companies like Best Buy and Zappos, where employers focus less on face time, and more on work achieved.

Nicholas Holland, an entrepreneur and founder of Populr, a publishing platform that allows users to make good-looking single-page websites, and the digital agency Centresource, serves as a local expert on ROWE, advising companies large and small on its benefits. Holland challenges Nashville executives to think differently when it comes to structuring their office life, from initiating flexible hours to placing a focus on corporate culture. His argument is that companies can use ROWE to add a lot of value for potential employees without spending more on recruiting or facilities. “Right now, there’s a lack of resources so everyone is trying to entice and incentivize the same tech pool,” he says. “Larger firms, especially in Nashville, like healthcare firms have the ability to throw a lot of money at the problem, but many workers are looking for other things like a fuller career path, or an ecosystem that supports their personal lives.” (Holland sent me his answers using his company’s product, which includes many more ROWE resources.)

The Nashville Technology Council also works closely with local government leaders, many of whom are on a coordinating committee that meets once a month. One of those members is Matt Largen, director of the office of economic development in Williamson County, south of Nashville. He’s partnering with local community colleges to find funding sources for specific IT certification programs that meet the immediate needs of companies in the area. Across the region, says Massey, the Council works with the 14 universities, as well as community colleges, to tailor programs to employers’ needs, namely in healthcare, where technology changes rapidly.

But Nashville isn’t just focused on college outreach, they’re also targeting junior high school students. Largen says his team is laser-focused on increasing the number of eighth graders who enroll in a track they call Foundations of Information Technology. “We know there is a high retention rate of students who start in the foundation class and continue throughout the IT track so we decided to focus our energy and resources there,” he says. This includes sending a letter from the Nashville Technology Council to every eighth-grade parent and bringing in volunteers to answer questions about IT careers. “The bottom line is that we have to reach out to kids who show an interest and aptitude in technology and make them aware of the wide variety of career options.”

It seems like it might not be the best investment of energy–there’s no guarantee that those students will stay in Nashville when they enter the workforce–plus, could so much emphasis on tech that early be pushing kids away from other potential careers? Largen says that since technology is so pervasive in all jobs, a focus on IT in schools means building a stronger regional economy, period. “In today’s economy, talent drives economic development,” he says. “Plus, growing our own sector is going to be the direct result of efforts to push IT into early grades.”

Katherine McElroy, a partner at C3 Consulting, also works closely with Nashville’s public schools, where she says teachers, too, need to be aware of the widening tech field. She encourages local tech companies to host three-day “externships” during the summer for teachers. “It really helps for teachers to see how technology is used throughout companies in all types of industries,” she says. She also points to local efforts to engage young women, like an Art2Stem camp for girls in the summer, and the local Women in Technology-Tennessee chapter, that sponsors mentorships and scholarships for girls.

Although the Nashville Is Hiring campaign has only been recently announced, Massey says the effort will include an ad campaign as well as visits to tech conferences like SXSW. Earlier this year, the Technology Council sent a street team of young Nashville residents to the Tennessee music festivals CMA MusicFest and Bonaroo wearing bright yellow shirts that exclaimed “I’m a hotspot!” with QR codes that could be scanned for more information about the tech jobs available.

Massey hopes that the campaign will allow them to entice workers from nearby Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Raleigh, but their bigger range of initiatives will also allow them to lure tech workers away from larger cities like L.A., New York, and Chicago. She thinks their efforts show candidates that Nashville is dedicated to creating the best tech working environment in the country. “I challenge them to find another city on their short list that has such a coordinated effort and is taking such a holistic approach.”

Follow the conversation on Twitter using the tag #WhyHere.

Image: Cheryl Casey via Shutterstock

Some of the most interesting new ideas about office design have come out of collaborations between advertising agencies and architects. Agencies tend to make fantastic clients, often encouraging designers to stretch their creative legs and try out unusual spatial schemes. Portlandia even lampooned the trend with a sketch that shows Carrie Brownstein lost inside of Wieden+Kennedy’s labyrinthine office in Portland, designed by Allied Works.

“Very often quality thinking does not happen within the structures of the office; it happens outdoors, out in the city, or at home,” writes architect Edward Ogosta, whose new scheme for a 30-person creative agency is called Hybrid Office. Ogosta wants to create workplaces that reflect the diversity of ways in which we think and cooperate.

At first glance, Ogosta’s design for the 6,000-square-foot warehouse doesn’t seem all that unusual. But a closer inspection of the sleek particleboard furniture reveals that something isn’t quite as it should be. Each piece of furniture is a “hybrid,” an unlikely combination of two objects with no obvious relationship. For example, a city block has mated with a desk to create workspaces that look like little gabled houses. An amphitheater’s steps are detailed with bookshelves, making it into a de facto reading room. The trunk of a tree had been grafted onto a chair, creating a cocoon-like seat. Ogosta explains that he wanted to diversify the types of spaces available to workers. “I think working in and with these hybrid-objects will quietly stimulate new levels of creativity in its users,” he tells Co.Design.

Ogosta started making hybrids back in 2009, as a side project. He’s designed dozens of them, ranging from table/floor combos to a forest of chairs. “Each hybrid synthesizes essential traits from two ‘parents’ of differing typologies,” he says, creating entirely new typologies in the process. The resulting mutations are surprising and brilliantly functional: a table made from drawing paper, for example. They make perfect sense in a creative workplace.

“Workers should not feel chained to their desk,” argues Ogosta. “They should be entitled the flexibility to work lying down in a quiet nook, at a table in a bustling lunch-room, or sitting under a tree in the garden if they please.”

It’s architecture built by groups of random strangers. Each building lasts only for a few seconds. And the walls are made of glycerin and water.

The Bubble Building was a temporary installation designed by DUS Architects at the International Architecture Biennial in Rotterdam last month. The so-called “world’s most fragile and temporary pavilion” invited Biennial visitors to get their hands dirty–er, clean–creating public architecture.

For three weeks in April, 16 hexagonal aluminum ponds were installed in a Rotterdam park and filled to the brim with soapy water. Groups of visitors could don rubber wellies and step into the troughs, lifting up thin hexagonal rods to create the billowing bubble “walls” of the pavilion. Each iteration only lasted a few seconds, and according to the architects, many visitors stayed for hours.

“The Bubble Building is also about emerging new forms of collective building,” explain DUS, whose office tagline is “Public Architecture.” Rotterdam was almost completely razed during World War II–the city is still in a state of perpetual construction–and that impermanence is reflected in the billowing walls of soap. But “ultimately,” say the architects, “the Bubble Building is about beauty.” Extra points for honesty.

DUS has a full explanation of the project on their website, here.

It’s been a drizzly May here in New York. With so many rainy days, the city’s parks haven’t gotten much use. Which is unfortunate, as one of them–Madison Square Park–is currently inhabited by a group of noisy, brightly colored blobs that ask strangers to play with them.

Admittedly, loud, misshapen lumps that invite you to touch them aren’t an unusual sight in Manhattan’s parks. But these particular blobs are part of California artist Charles Long’s newest piece, Pet Sounds, commissioned Mad. Sq. Art, the arts arm of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

At its unveiling on May 2nd (another dreary, misty day), Pet Sounds was difficult to miss: Brightly colored blobs slumped in disconcertingly human postures on benches and picnic tables scattered throughout the park. Touching one of the blobs elicited gurgling electronic noises ranging from a few bars of jazz to actual animal noises, activated by electronic sensors embedded in their fiberglass-and-aluminum skin. The “pets” became uncanny instruments, played by the visitors apprehensively exploring them.

Long, whose past work has been shown in the Whitney and MoMA, was gracious enough to answer a few of our questions about Pet Sounds. Below, he talks about the Beach Boys, the theremin, and the hive mind of New York City.

You’ve said before that your artistic process is extremely experiential. What experiences spurred the creation of the piece?

Pet Sounds was three years from start to finish; I spent countless hours in the park observing what happens there and setting up experiments.

I photographed people sleeping on the benches and did drawings of them as amorphous blobs that attached to the park. Soon I was exploring the concept of the park as a mental state, a place of the unconscious, sort of turning the real park in on itself. I began to see the people sitting and dozing on benches as park features, and conversely, I began to see the park features, such as the railings, as snaking limbs. This eventually led to my creation of this system of railings defining paths spilling out onto the great lawn, where they evolve into human-scale blobs, lounging on benches and plopping down on a picnic table.

I wanted people to connect to these blobs, to be affected by them in this strange, abstract way, so I sculpted forms on the scale of the human body. The intense colors, slick surfaces, and elusive figuration seduce further. You can’t place it – it’s what Freud called the uncanny. The slippery forms are so smooth, so synthetically sexy, they beckon to be caressed.

I also wanted the blobs to respond to human touch: physically with vibrations, and then emotionally, through the wide array of sounds that I created in the studio. I sensitized the skins of these masses with numerous unseen “zones,” which must be found through hands-on exploration. Touching different parts of these blobs generates different responses. The entire surface of the blob also acts like a speaker; your hands pick up sounds that cannot be heard and our ears pick up vibrations that might not be felt.

Can you talk a little about the technology at work in the piece?

Each blob has an electronic brain. Wires connecting the numerous sensitized zones of the skin send primitive signals to a microcontroller–sort of like a brain stem–which interprets it according to the significance of that zone. It sends a very specific bit of coded information about this zone to a mini PC, which executes the particular command is associated with that zone.

That command is output to a transducer embedded in the surface of the blob, which activates the skin to act sort of like a speaker – which is very important because these blobs have no mouths. They have no eyes or ears, for that matter. It’s all about touch and vibrations.

How do the Beach Boys figure in?

I borrowed the title for this project from what is considered by many to be the most important pop album ever made. It will always be the touchstone for my creative process. Brian Wilson’s studio work on the Beach Boys’ 1966 masterpiece was certainly one of the most open creative processes of its time, while still yielding an emotionally meaningful and aurally complex collection of songs, which are still accessible to a wide spectrum of listeners today. Pet Sounds is still influencing musicians…

It was the first pop recording to use the Theremin, an electronic instrument that responds sonically in relation to the proximity of the musician’s body – an idea that captivated me as a youth and is part of what I wanted from this project. During the recording of the album, Brian was bringing in sounds like bicycle bells, rattling coke cans, dog whistles, and dog barks, mixing them in with the sublime vocals of the band and dozens of instruments not associated with pop music.

This project is something of a homecoming for you, as New Yorker who moved to LA fairly recently. Is Pet Sounds a reflection of New York?

I still consider New York my home… I’ve seen a lot of great bands and a lot of great art in my 21 years of living here. And I always think of this place as the collective mind that I draw from and contribute to. What New Yorkers think of what I do here matters a lot to me (you people have very high standards, which I am gratefully challenged by). The freshness of the work has less to do with a California Beach Boys style than with my excitement for a very unique engagement with New York and its visitors.

You once collaborated with Stereolab – did you have any musical collaborators on this project?

It would be a dream to collaborate with the Beach Boys, who reunited this year for a 50th anniversary tour (they played the Beacon on May 8 and 9; I would love for them to see this project!).

But for this installation, I was interested in creating a very abstract experience for the viewer/listener, so I didn’t want the kind of nameable presence a musician would bring. If I could have removed myself from the project, it would have been perfect. But I think that can still occur, because the vast majority of visitors will not know my name or care who I am. They will simply enjoy the project on their own, making music as they wish, trying to figure out how to get the sounds they want from the blobs. I presume they will have a good time.

Pet Sounds is on view in Madison Square Park until September 9.