Sky Reverie
Interactive Installation, 2005
MFA Thesis Project, SVA
Concept
Throughout childhood, the dusky and eerie sky was not an element of menace but a fantastic playground in my imagination. Every night I was feeling some tangible energy from the stars and the swirling rhythms of the cosmic particles. I was entranced by their twisting, turbulent, voluminous forms, and their capricious, migrating transformations.
Sky Reverie is an immersive installation environment which meshes corporeal, spiritual and virtual domains. Here, the visitors’ consciousness is reoriented back towards that of untainted, lucid childhood. In Sky Reverie, visitors may enjoy visual and audio elements while physically playing with and in a huge inflated plastic cloud. When they stretch their hands up inside this cloud, as if they’re whispering their hopes to the sky, hundreds of stars fall into line to create a constellation triggered by fluctuations of viewers’ shadows. Meanwhile a profusion of blue LEDs, which react to visitors’ movements, facilitate people’s immersion in this atmospheric, celestial paradise. The piece’s fluorescent-driven blue and purple haze serves as, in author Patricia Troyer’s words, primal substance, tangible but intangible at the same time, one that transforms the visitors’ experience into a kind of extension of self into the sphere of the grater universe.
The small cozy refuge, inside of a cloud, acts as a metaphor for a space of meeting, private space, and pathway between palpable and virtual world. The translucent plastic used in its fabrication relates to the notion of the permeability of boundaries and space. Evoked in a heartfelt way in Miazaki’s film, Kiki’s Delivery Service when kids and pets exuberantly lift hands from knees to air, with halcyon dreams for lush growth of their garden. Similarly, numerous rituals from earlier cultures involve gestures of reaching for the sky to solicit abundance and power beyond the indifferent vicissitudes of nature.
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