Neural Sky Exhibit: FoxLin

Coachella Valley, California, 2014

Michael Fox and Juintow Lin’s design practice, FoxLin, frequently operates at the scale of interactive installations that incorporate lighting, sound, robotic, and sensing technology. They sit in a lineage that includes Norbert Weiner and Gordon Pask; in fact, early in his career Fox worked for Pask-protégé John Frazer. Frazer essentially took Cedric Price’s idea of Anticipatory Architecture and extended it into the ambition for architecture to become a “living, evolving thing.” A contemporary take on these ideas is investigated by FoxLin through experiments in decentralized responsive systems, based in logics of bio-mimetic processes, and powered by new technologies in computation. The practice itself is engaged in a dialectical process, consisting of design research into the study of kinetics to facilitate adaptation, and the design of computation as a means of controlling the kinetics.

Neural Sky Exhibit is one such example. Commissioned for the 2014 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the installation attempts to render in light, form, and movement the elusive qualities of information itself. Resembling a large-scale, three-dimensional “neural network” that responds to the movement of bodies in and around the installation by generating a series of temporal lighting effects, the project could be viewed as a sort of performance-machine. Utilizing computation to produce a new type of public space, architecture is defined not only in terms of its physical form, but also its decentralized and adaptable form. Manifested as light, this newly adaptable architecture sponsors as well as “draws” new conditions of social interaction.

Neural Sky Exhibit, with over 10,000 computer-controlled LED lights, connects the physical locations of people within the structure by a luminescent path of light. The installation was accessible to over 200,000 concertgoers over the course of three days, providing a temporary public space for high intensity forms of human interaction and play. While the formal aesthetic of a neural network is achieved by using a light steel frame wrapped with fabric, computing and sensing technologies distributed throughout the structure allow for a dynamic neural network of sense and response activity. Of interest to the designers was the possibility of decentralized or distributed networks producing emergent behavior. Not unlike a brain, then, the Neural Sky Exhibit absorbs, processes, and redistributes information over time, translating human movement into artificial light, which in turn influences human movement once again. In this way, the installation operates like a feedback machine with its human inhabitants, a twenty-first century adaptation of Gordon Pask’s 1960s idea of Conversation Theory in which architects interpret spaces and users.

Neural Sky Exhibit at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Courtesy Michael Fox and Cal Poly Pomona.