Organized chaos comes with a caveat: The chaos is only organized from the perspective of the person who created it in the first place. To everyone else, it’s just a mess. A new kinetic sculpture called Breaking Wave explores the idea of how a change in perspective can bring clarity to chaos—in this case the chaos being 804 wooden balls that are suspended from the ceiling in the lobby of Biogen-Idec, a biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Biogen-Idec commissioned Hypersonic, a Brooklyn creative engineering studio, and Plebian Design to create an anchoring sculpture for its office. From most perspectives, Breaking Wave is simply a mess of dangling spheres. But every 80 seconds, if you happen to be in the exact right position, you’ll see the balls align into a perfectly focused image of a Fibonacci spiral and a circular labyrinth, like a 3-D version of Magic Eye.
The concept is a nod to Biogen-Idec’s work, which harnesses the power of data to create new medicines for people with neurodegenerative diseases and autoimmune disorders. “What they have is a massive amount of data that they have to look at in the right way in order to make something from it,” explains Hypersonic’s Bill Washabaugh. Looking at the data sets as a series of raw numbers gives little clue to their significance, but given the right framework, scientists are able to create life-changing drugs.
There are two spots in the Biogen-Idec office from which the sculpture appears as a perfect spiral (One is found in the main lobby, just past security, and the other is from outside the building looking in through the front windows). Ensuring the the sculpture held two simultaneous images was an engineering feat. “The technical challenge here is that I have two images that I want to see at the same time,” says Jeff Lieberman of Plebian Design in the video (made by Alberta Chu of ASKlabs). “This one cloud has to accomplish both of those things.”
Solving that problem took some old-school math work. Thankfully, both designers are self-proclaimed math and science geeks who happen to have an artistic bent. Before founding Hypersonic, Washabaugh was an aerospace engineer for Boeing, and before founding Plebian Design Lieberman was a PhD candidate at MIT. The structure they came up with for Biogen-Idec tapped all of this expertise. It’s a complex mechanical system of more than 1,000 moving parts. One motor at the top of the piece drives all the movement, with thirty-six roller tracks move across a rotating stainless steel cam. Each of those tracks control a stainless steel cable that winds around dozens of drums of varying diameters. It’s those drums that control the movement of the 804 spheres. A large drum diameter lifts a ball high, while the movement of a small drum is more subtle—combined they make the precise animation possible.
Washabaugh, Lieberman and their teams mapped out the movements in software, plotting the correct coordinates so that the spheres would move in an exacting motion without looking jerky and stiff. Watching Breaking Wave in action is like watching hundreds of circular puppets doing a highly-choreographed dance. The balls undulate like a wave before pulling up into a perfect six-and-a-half foot in diameter sphere. The piece is an ode to not just art, but to the science that makes it possible. “It’s really exciting to find ways to combine art and science together,” says Washabaugh. “The sculptures and pieces we create not only look interesting and cool, but they challenge the way people see the world and think about art.”