http://www.raaf.org/

ICELANDIC RIFT

Icelandic Rift is a series of structures assembled from industrial materials, stark yet organic forms, and automated systems. These sculptures form modular systems of organic architecture that play on the viewer’s senses of scale and gravity. The Rift sculptures include electromechanical systems which automate lights and fluids within the sculpture body. Materials in the series include aluminum, cast acrylic, eurothene, ferrofluid, and custom kinetics and electronics.

In all, the structures in the Icelandic Rift series represent a future vision of agriculture and growth in a zero-g environment. They are composed of artificial islands supported and connected by steel and aluminum struts so that they can be assembled as part of a greater mechanical system that hovers above the floor. Together the architecture formed by these structures is designed to be perceived as both vaguely familiar and also austerely alien.

On the larger aluminum islands in the series sit smaller island forms cut from cast acrylic and/or aluminum. The island centers are hollowed out to function as reservoirs to hold ferrofluid – a type of liquid magnet. This is a dense black liquid that has the startling quality of spiking up when an earth magnet is placed in its proximity. Under some of these islands I have automated hard magnets and electromagnets that, in turn, automate the standing ferrofluid liquid in the reservoirs so that the liquid is made to spin, rise, twitch, or travel. These symbolize the energy sources for the systems.

These pieces were inspired by the landscapes that I explored in Iceland in 2004. There, I saw breathtakingly monumental glaciers which seemed to float atop fields smooth black lava rock. In other parts of the country, there were endless stains of acid green sulfur on the earth as well as steaming blue pools of heat-loving algae which defied one’s sense of “the natural”. The landscape in Iceland is famous for its lunar feel but its elements seemed to trump gravity and logic in ways that were utterly unexpected. I am also drawing inspiration for this work from the multi-tiered design of staged, hillside agricultural systems such as those seen in Asian rice terraces. Last, I am drawing inspiration from the soft design forms found in domed space observatories, water droplets, and BioSpheres.