A week before the day of, we assemble the bubble. I had painted the nebulous ceiling with spray paint, and was quite proud of the level of detail accomplished, although the lighting in my garage made it impossible to capture neither its glory nor the lingering, gagging smell of spray paint. While I let the universe thaw in my garage for a few days, it started teeming with life. Several things got stuck in it: bugs, lawn clippings, a stray leaf, dog hair. When it had gathered enough authenticity, I rolled it up and took it to our assembly space.

Caleb and Ore worked on putting the bubble together, while I assembled art that went inside it. Here’s what each of them had to say about the day’s experience:

Caleb: “It looked a lot easier on video. Cutting the sheets of plastic took a lot of time, and the results were not as I expected. There was a lot of doubt, but when it finally blew up, it was cool. People were walking by the room, looking in, and wondering what in the world we were doing.”

Ore: “My knees hurt. Best feeling was when the bubble finally blew up.”

  

The bubble worked, eventually. A box fan was responsible for blowing air into it and keeping it inflated. We had pieces of a talking poem, which was a work in development for a future show. We had an anamorphic tree installation. No clouds, no lighted city, and a peeling universe on the ceiling.

 

 

This article is a little choppy. But stay with me. The universe flows with its own currents. I have written it as a three part series: “Inception,” “The Making,” and “Execution” to document the process of putting together an installation art project.

Stage I: Inception

Imagine a greenhouse. It’s a sweltering muggy day, and you’re inside a plastic bubble, swimming in 115 degrees, skin flaking like an old tree bark. You’re making art, and it’s a mess – a beautiful mess.

We saw the first rendition of the Multibubble on a cool May evening. It’s spring in Kansas, and one of those amazing to be outdoors kind of night. The last Friday of the month, teeming with art gallery crawlers, food trucks and craft beer. We were there to stake out the installation because we had been invited to participate in creating it in July.

The bubble is glowing, and the light inside makes you curious. We see half-finished to fully realized works of art inside, and we start making plans for the summer.

Its suddenly July.

The Multibubble installation will be part of the Wichita Mini Maker Faire. Indoors, several makers will have their booths with things they make, demonstrations, show and tell, Q and A, and the Multibubble will be staged outside, at the festival plaza. People can walk into the bubble, and experience a diverse interpretation of a bubble universe.

Here’s our plan so far.

The bubble will be a world of its own. The ceiling will be painted like a starry sky. White balloons covered in fluff will look like low hanging clouds. People would have to move the clouds out of the way to see the starry sky. Around the perimeter of the bubble, a cardboard city will light up as people walk by, and in the center, will be a monument, a giant cylindrical mirror. It looks amazing in our heads, and like a 3^rd grader’s drawing in paper. From the outside, it’s a 9 x 9 x 9 ft. cuboid.

The scale of our observable universe, is so big and so small. The distance between galaxies are astronomical, too large to fathom, while the distance between subatomic particles are only nanometers apart, too small to sense. Between these scales, lie all human perceptions, our sense of sight and hearing, limited to a few nanometers of visible wavelengths and a few kHz of audible wavelengths. Yet we try to understand all things big and small with telescopes, microscopes and instruments that help make sense of our observations. We are like the people in the allegory of the cave, our entire understanding, made of shadows.

Artists’ Statement

Our work thrives on interdisciplinary connections. We are a group of students with diverse academic and industry backgrounds, currently in the Masters of Innovation Design program at Wichita State University. Joining together on art installations, launching new products, and starting businesses, these projects have allowed us to discover different perspectives, and be shaped by influences we may not have been exposed to otherwise. It is an experience we try to share and hope to carry forward in future endeavors.

In the show Cloud Fiber, we have attempted to create at the intersection of Art, Science and Storytelling, creating bridges with technology. We have used industrial materials to make art, created a new way of consuming poetry by touching it, and collaborated with the audience to add color to our work. By mixing materials and methods, we hope to cross pollinate ideas across disciplinary silos, and to make interdisciplinary collaborations the norm of human learning.

Resha Parajuli has a master’s in Astrophysics, industry experience in science museums and STEM learning, and is currently in the MID program.

Caleb Wilson is a marketing professional with a background in feature film production and television news. He is a student of the Masters of Innovation Design program at Wichita State.

Max Hinman has a background in Cellular Biology, experience in mobile application development, and is currently enrolled in the MID program.

Matthew Walsh is a digital performance and new media artist and composer working in the Kansas City area. He is currently up to no good.

Welcome to my very first blog post! My adventures of intentional interdisciplinary studies began here. I say intentional because I have always done interdisciplinary work, but this is where it became articulate and sharable.

In a class called Seminar in Creativity and Innovation, we talked about creativity in its different forms, how it manifests in different lines of work, and how it affects us as learners. We looked for creativity in architecture, healthcare risk management systems, disaster relief efforts, artistic performances, and urban planning. Around mid-semester, we were assigned a project –  to participate in a wearable art competition Project Run-A-Way, and in the process, discover creativity. This article is an account of my journey through this unusual assignment.

It was unusual because we were not art students. Only one of us had an art background, and in my case, some, if you can count an undergraduate minor in art. We barely knew each other, and our challenge was to connect across disciplines and preconceptions and create something good enough to pass the class.

Our first instinct was to go solo. Stay in our bubbles and do a project, it was going to be awesome. I had so many ideas, yet all of them came quickly, became too complicated too fast, and were abandoned quickly. The more I dwelled on these half-formed ideas, the more I started to realize that perhaps we needed to collaborate. After a week or two of going back and forth about who’s going to get an email chain going, we finally decided to meet after class.

We had tried digitally brainstorming, but once we were in a physical space, it was much more intuitive to interact and brainstorm. By the first meeting, we had a well-articulated idea. We were going to use a software that detects motion and outputs grids of color blocks and sounds that respond to movement in real time. We were then going to project those altered images onto a wearable surface, and call it digital fashion. We came up with a convincing narrative:

“Cloud_fiber explores the boundaries between the physical and the digital, and between the geometric and organic through colors, textures and shapes. The work is a collaborative piece between artist and audience. When audience engage with the artwork, a white canvas comes to life with movement and colors.”

We had a drawing on the white board, and we were glowing in the not-yet-existent projector lights.

“Preconceptions hinder creativity. Part of unlearning is to leave back all preconceived notions. Unlearning makes you go to an uncomfortable space, and it is important to dwell in that space.”

 – Kyna Leski, The Storm of Creativity.

In the beginning, we apologized to each other a lot, and asked for permission a lot. Yes, sure, sorry, I don’t mean to cut you, I’m cool with whatever. We (I will only speak for myself now, so I) wanted to be agreeable but also wanted my idea to show through the group’s idea. “But I really want to do that twirly electronic thing I thought about for 5 seconds. Am I going to be the one person who has to do all the work? Who’s going to send emails? I hate writing emails.”

As our idea started to take form, and as we started to know each other a little more, we started setting some of our inhibitions aside, we started to become comfortable with not knowing, and letting go, and we embraced our collective genius over an individual genius.

I made several drawings for the physical piece, and after pages and pages of weird looking iterations, we settled on two designs. Often times, when you see finished pieces, they look like they were done in one spark of creativity. We don’t always see the discards and the mess-ups that lead to the end results, but there is a lot of insight to be gained by taking the time to go through the process.

 

Alongside physical prototyping, we were testing the digital piece. We needed to choose a material, so we thought of stretched fabric, opaque plastic, poster board, and tested each material with the digital projection. What looks good? What makes the best shadows? Stark contrast, clear images? Wavy? Smooth? Lighted? In this process, we learned so much about the materials we worked with, and their properties of strength, flexibility and reflection. We settled on K’nex for the frame, foam core for projection, and string lights and bright scarves to wave in front of the camera.

    

Next, we had to think about all the how to’s. Foam board looks good. But how to cut it into this complicated shape? How to install it to a frame? How to set up the equipment? We started with what we knew how to do – joining, gluing, cutting. The foam core boards were a dollar each at the dollar store. So, there was a lot of room to make mistakes, and that probably enabled us to take some risks with the design. It wasn’t that hard to cut the big shapes, but after messing up a few boards trying to cut little circles with an x-acto knife, and even a circle compass cutter (they are actually really cool, just not for cutting 50 circles,) we decided to try a new thing – use a foam cutting machine.

But that meant doing a lot of uncomfortable things. Such as, figuring out how to digitally design something, how the machine works, getting measurements right, coordinating with the lab manager to set up a time to use it, ask for help. Heck, it’s so much easier to just pick up an x-acto knife and start jabbing at a board! That was a preconception. That was inhibition. That was uncomfortable space. We needed to dwell there for a while. We need to unlearn and learn again.

As a result, now that I’ve done the digital design and machine cutting, I’m never going to go the tedious route of x-acto knives.

So we drew, we cut, we glued, we stacked, we separated, we glued, we painted, we glued. There was a lot of hot glue involved.

We also allowed our projects and ourselves to evolve. Creativity is always in motion. We discarded a lot of ideas and picked up new ones. Nothing goes exactly as planned. For the performance part, we had planned at least 5 people on stage, dancing like a jig saw puzzle coming together as one projection screen. We didn’t find 5 dancers, so we scaled back to 2 non-dancers. We had dimensionally flat designs for the costumes. But as we worked, and as we discovered that cutting circles was a breeze with the machine, we went crazy with the circles. They added depth to the designs. We went on stage with these behemoth creations awkwardly strapped to our bodies. We couldn’t fit a projector to the ceiling because the event was in an atrium, so we configured a makeshift projector stand. Our performer had to perform with his back to the judges because that’s just how the judges’ tables were set, and we needed them to see the screens. The software created sounds that responded to movement. The DJ did not turn the background music off, so no one heard it. And yet, we adapted to every hurdle and learned that creativity is not just sitting in solitude and painting a masterpiece, but it has a lot to do with meaningful collaborations, management of resources, working with constraints, and adapting with agility.

        

         

The surprising thing for us was that we won the competition, not just in our category, but we won best in show. We were clearly not expecting it. When we were on stage, people had clapped and cheered, so I was hopeful for an honorable mention. Some of us were frustrated with the things that didn’t work, and when they announced our name, we were in the back of the room, mostly complaining. So winning was exciting.

We got some prize money, which was nice, but we also got to display the work at a gallery. This is a whole another story, and an upcoming one. In the meantime, our pieces were also displayed in the art department hallway. Look how sad they look on the headless mannequins! They cannot stand alone without the lights and the movement that bring them to life. They look like patchwork-cheap foam class projects (which they are).  It is a collaboration piece, and just like creativity, it only works with all its different facets working together like a tippy table.