In the late nineteenth-century and post-Victorian era, the world was changing rapidly, seemingly spinning out of control: Electricity, the phonograph, telegraphy, technological innovation and industrialization on a scale never witnessed before, this was the modern world we have no trouble recognizing today. These radical changes, which took place at the turn of the 20th century, were ignited by the explorers, the innovators, the creators, the ones who speculated, who invented, who imagined. They were the ones who pushed the human race forward…

As the digital revolution and interactions in the virtual world grow, physical space is becoming less meaningful and engaging to its occupants and yet it is fuller than ever. With its temperatures, odors, memories, movements, sounds, radio frequencies, communication networks, fire-wires, and digital cultural agencies space is never empty but always full. This project is a catalytic exploration on “other” dimensionalities of space. “Square Inches of Love” is a self-initiated public project. A focal ideology of this installation is to weave the virtual and real worlds of the consumers of space. The goal is to demonstrate to the public the power of collective effort and creativity and the ability of virtual efforts to render great out comes in an effort to encourage positive changes in peoples’ behaviors towards a socially + digitally sustainable future.

Rather than producing the content for the installation we chose to rely on access to open source of information for weaving layers of creativity into the project, while facilitating the exertion of anomalies and the “un-expected”s to breathe new layers of inspiration and beauty into the “Square Inches of Love” project. Therefore, we created this project as a unique open-participation exhibition that begins online and then transforms into the real world as a touring installation, a combination of business, pleasure, creativity, expression, education and philanthropy. During the online phase of the project, its current phase, we will be collecting content and funds for the exhibition: Each participant can purchase as few as 1 square inches of space on a one million square inch grid to use as canvas to share their creativity, point of view, message of hope or advertisement. 50% of the proceeds will be donated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. With the remaining funds, OPeX studios will undertake transforming all the collected submissions into a one million square inch custom-printed fabric quilt base, fabricating 3D structural elements to guide exploration of the exhibit, and taking the installation on tour for all to explore. The culmination of the “Square Inches of Love” project will be an interactive, thought-provoking, and entertaining installation that blurs the boundaries between exhibition, environment, and product advertisement.

Through investigating a body of under-researched spatial properties, such as its social sustainability and communication networks, the “Square Inches of Love” project ambitiously seeks to explore alternate ways of unpacking space while contributing to the better understanding of the human behavior, in particular its relationship to designing the unfamiliar elicited by today’s world of digital culture, DIY mentality, and “an incredible access to an endless supply of information”.
As such, the project is an exclamation point rather than a resolution, or a final product.