The Leonardo Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah     with Yong Ju Lee and Noa Younse

Dynamic Performance of Nature is a permanent spatial media installation in the Leonardo Museum of Art, Science and Technology, located in Salt Lake City, Utah. DPoN engenders environmental perception in the museum’s visitors by communicating global environmental information through a dynamic and interactive interface embedded in the material of the wall. DPoN invites curious inquisition as well as detached contemplation of the synthesis of light, material, space, and global environmental information.

Environmental sensors capture data from sources throughout the planet and feed that data to solar-powered LEDs embedded in the sine-wave form made of recycled plastic. As the sensors register changes in temperature, wind, seismicity, and other factors, the LEDs reflect these fluctuations with continuous spectral waves that represent minute shifts in the data feed from moment to moment. At 92 feet long and over 14 feet high, DPoN covers 1300 sqft of vertical exhibition space traversing the museum’s ground floor lobby and acting as a programmatic threshold between exhibit spaces. It’s composed of 176 unique recycled HDPE fins embedded with 1,888 full-color RGB LED’s and held together by approximately 8000 individual set screws. We estimate the amount of plastic this project diverted from a landfill to be around three tons.

The color spectrum seen flowing through the wall reflects temperatures in the weather feed; the speed of color flow across the piece shows actual wind speed; the direction of color flow indicates the direction of the wind with cardinal directions oriented to the sides of the wall. When an earthquake registers with the USGS, a distorted world map on the wall displays the earthquake's location — the brighter the color and more frequent the lights flash, the stronger the quake. Visitors can interact with DPoN using Twitter to send messages to @LeoArtwall that either change the global weather feed or simply paint a wash of colors that dance and chase across the wall.