This article was first published in the January 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Artist Janet Echelman creates otherworldly aerial sculptures. Composed of hand-spliced and knotted lightweight fibres, they're coloured by projected light (pictured above is As If It Were Already Here, which appeared in Massachusetts, in 2015). "They're about the complexity of interaction that we cannot predict," explains US-based Echelman, 49. "I am drawn to urban spaces, because I think that art should be part of life."
The pieces are designed using custom-made soft-body modelling software from Autodesk. It allows Echelman to model the interaction of every single element. She constructs the pieces from highly engineered fibres, such as ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, which is 15 times stronger than steel. Looms are used to make panels and then shapes are cut, knotted and spliced by hand.
"My work is pre-industrial in terms of these old techniques. It's industrial with the looms. And it's post-industrial in terms of the digital analysis. We're not cut off from our past, but neither are we cut off from our future."
Echelman's latest will debut at the Lumiere London light festival in January. Its title, 1.8 London, refers to the microseconds by which the day was shortened by the 2011 Japanese quake; the piece is inspired by a data set of the wave heights of the tsunami. Using smartphones, the public will be able to change the colour of the sculpture. "It's a contemplation on connectedness and the larger cycles of time," Echelman says.
Lumiere Londonruns from January 14-17
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
