This year's TED conference saw talks by Edward Snowden and Sergey Brin. Strictly speaking, though, the biggest attraction had to be the 750-foot jellyfish-like mass suspended just outside the Vancouver venue.
"Unnumbered Sparks" was created by Janet Echelman and Aaron Koblin to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the annual conference. Echelman's an artist known for canopying city streets with colorful, quivering mesh sculptures. Koblin heads up Google Creative Lab, the data art outfit responsible for Arcade Fire's pioneering web videos, among other interactive works.
The gist of their collaboration? A massive version of one of Echelman's signature sculptures that people could draw on with their smartphones.
The work, which was hoisted up next to the venue for the four-day duration of the conference, was Echelman's largest sculpture to date, made with fiber ropes 15 times stronger than steel. A wash of vibrant colors was projected on the nets from below; with the Chrome mobile browser, passersby could connect to a server and add their own visual flourish to the spectacle.
In that sense, you could say the sculpture served as a giant artistic canvas. A website for the project gives us another way of thinking about it: "When you look at the sculpture, you're looking at a web browser. The lighting on the sculpture is actually a single fullscreen Google Chrome window over 10 million pixels in size." A slightly nerdier take, but a gigantic tab in the sky has a strange poetry of its own.
Echelman and Koblin are both drawn to the idea of creating art that, however momentarily, imbues everyday life with a measure of unforeseen delight.
"This is something you don't expect to encounter on the street," Echelman says in the video above. "It's just something about having your routine broken up--looking up at the sky and changing your perspective for a moment." Presumably, the artists made sure to get all their settings just right beforehand. Nothing ruins the world's biggest browser art like the world's biggest pop-up.
