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Project Details

Fabric 1

Symmetry
Producer/Manufacturer: Fisher Textiles
Primary Use: Main Fabric

Design Name
James LaPLante

Design Company
Sputnik Animation

Fabrication Name
Connor Pirrucello-McClellan

Fabrication Company
Transformit

Graphics Name
music by Emily Hopkins

Project Manager Name
Cynthia Thompson

Project Manager Company
Transformit

Installation Name
Connor Pirrucello-McClellan, Cynthia Thompson

Installation Company
Transformit

Please describe the project specifications

Quantum Lotus
Following a successful recent immersive and interactive art collaboration, we were invited to make a proposal for the new Immersive Media Studio at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Our installation was open for visitors from April 20 to May 24, 2024, with an artists' talk and reception on May 9.

Quantum Lotus is the result of several brainstorm sessions and sketch exchanges. We wanted to create something unique, without a large budget. I realized that we could de-construct several of our rental flowers, which allowed us to imagine two large Lotus flowers, exact mirrors of one another, whose twenty-five petals (fifty total) would make perfect indivdual screens for video-mapping. Imagining the petals arranged to encircle one visitor in each flower, we set about creating an interactive and immersive projected wonderland.

Professional experience in animation for science education inspired us to tackle, artistically, some key ideas in quantum mechanics: Entanglement, Superposition and the Quantum Chromodynamic field that permeates the Universe. The goal was to interpret the quantum world in a macro way, and to immerse the audience in a quantum state.

Each lotus is about twenty feet in diameter, and twelve feet tall. As each visitor stands in the center of a lotus, it senses their presence, and any movement.
• Their movements cause art and music to be generated, and this reaction varies based on the motion and position of their bodies and hands.
Here is where quantum mechanics comes in:
• What is projected onto lotus 1 is 'entangled' and reflected into lotus 2, and vice versa.
• Each flower lotus a light side, directly reacting to the movement of its visitor, and a dark side, showing the 'entangled' data from the other visitor's lotus.
• Both sides blend together to create a unique entangled piece of art.
• A series of musical phrases composed by harpist Emily Hopkins, who uses effect pedals to create otherworldly sounds, made a musical language that played between the two lotus forms.

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