The Waves of Stillness

Developed in partnership with Jennifer Golden

No matter how still a space may seem, our environments and their constituent elements remain tied to fluctuating factors of movement and the passage of time - there is always motion surrounding us, our spaces breathing with the undulations of a billion tiny pressures. Presumed unassuming and predictable landscapes reveal themselves to be a rich and dynamic home to a symphonies of elements, harmonizing and syncopating in and out of pandemouniousness and tranquility.

The Waves of Stillness is a project which uses simple instruments and components to measure and transport the ebb and flow of stillness within one space to another. First deployed alongside the banks of the Charles River and the grounds at Harvard, it embodies the spatially disconnected experience of stillness via actuated and pulsating fiber optics.

Stillness is quantified by changes in the states of physical (wind), visual (water, sky), and auditory (sound) environments. Once the landscape of stillness has been understood quantitatively as the amalgamation of these factors, the data is reprocessed and used to actuate the installation. The resulting qualitative experience is as ever-changing as the space from which it has been seeded.

Waves under Gund Hall