winter/spring 2025
Collaborative masters project with Koh Terai in the Stanford Design Program to create an interactive evening art installation aimed at provoking wonder and bringing people together
Koh and I started our masters project with the idea that evenings are a time of day where people used to regularly find both wonder and community - whether that be sitting around communal hearths where fire was the primary source of light or looking up into the stars. Today, more people spend their evenings in isolation, embarking on doom-scrolls or watching TV. Not to say those are bad things — we can also agree there's upsides to those activities, but we were wondering— are there new forms of evening wonder we could explore through the lens of gathering people together?
We created a few prototypes, but our final one was an installation called Light Loops - a 60ft tall interactive glowing loop that could be manipulated and swept through the sky by a user or multiple "played" in tandem to create a show by multiple people.
Video compilation of the final prototype
This project started off very open-ended. We were pretty much just told we could do whatever we wanted - here's some money.
We started with some basic research on the emotion of awe, reading Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner, who defines awe as "the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world."
We knew that we wanted to play with this idea of scale and the posture of feeling like a small part of something grand, and the prosocial power of this. Keltner writes that "wonder, the mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity, and embracing mystery, arises out of experiences of awe."
We aimed our first design at a need we saw in the engineering quad at Stanford - a lack of evening gathering spaces. We wanted to experiment with creating a cozy, magical oasis that people could stumble upon and then stay a while. To do this, I designed and fabricated a heated platform using the same heating elements as heated bathroom floors do, and grouted them in between pieces of plywood. Koh and I assembled it and hauled it over to the engineering quad with a fog machine, music, and some lights. We called it the Tree Bath.
Light Loops - Air Version
We felt the Tree Bath didn't draw in as many passerby's as we'd hoped. From this experience, we felt the need for an explicit invitation into the experience and a need for the thing being spectated being separate from the people participating.
Our next experiment was based off of this toy that Koh had found. He is an experienced projection mapping designer, and had the idea to combine these two mediums. We wanted to scale it really big, and our first idea of how to do that came from trying to recreate this youtube video.
We quickly realized that designing this thing to be powered by high air velocities rushing through plastic tubing created a lot of noise - killing the vibe of watching this loop dance gracefully through the sky.
We experimented with both forced air via leafblower and compressed air using an air compressor - but neither were quiet enough, and the compressed air, although able to generate high air speeds, needed a refresh time for the compressor tank to refill and didn't quite push enough volume of air.
Tree Bath - a misty oasis
Video: leaf-blower version
Light Loops v2
We then arrived at a critical choice— whether to continue pursuing an air-driven architecture or pivot to the same motorized architecture that we'd only proven at a small scale (toy-scale). I prepared this risk table as we debated, and we decided to try to scale the motorized architecture.
Risk Table: deciding to pursue air or motorized
For this next phase of the project, I owned the mechanical design of what would be our last prototype of the year.
3D Model designed in Solidworks
fully assembled
internals
fully assembled
another video of installation at Stanford's Meyer Green
Challenges & Acknowledgements
Thank you to Koh Terai, my friend and collaborator. I will never forget the fun times we had making this wacky and wonderful project. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
kalinais@stanford.edu
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