The story of a night
The experience takes the shape of a compressed night — dusk, storm, moonlight, shared breath, sunrise, tea — and a 3D simulation lets us walk through it before building it.
The installation now has a story. Belonging in ourselves, in others and in the environment are always connected, but this time the emphasis is on the environment. A cloud is a thing above you, a thing that interacts with light, and something we connect with at different times of day.
The phases
- Before: maybe a short reflection. Imagine a safe place, like a garden, to bring people into the space they carry with them.
- I · Dusk: enter at dusk or late evening. Sunset is like the lights going down in a cinema. Only ambient light; no light inside the cloud.
- II · Lightning storm: a palate cleanser. Noise that pulls people out of their previous context. Feeling exposed to the elements: nature as danger, the darker side of awe.
- III · Moonlight: it settles.
- IV · Shared breath: breath modulates the light. Synchrony moves time forward towards sunrise. When the group stays in step long enough, the system gradually takes the signal back, and their influence slowly fades.
- V · Sunrise: passive observation.
- Reflection: a tea ceremony.
Open questions: how do we invite people to breathe? Will they understand that they should breathe together? Do we frame it as a goal, like “save a cloud”, or leave it unspoken?
Simulating before building
To think through these phases, we built a 3D simulation of the room. Each participant is a figure lying on a mat, with their own cloud above them. Their breath is shown as a wave with its own rate, depth and phase. A room synchrony measure rises as the breaths align, and a lightning storm can be tuned for frequency and intensity. In the simulation, as synchrony reaches its peak, the individual clouds turn white and daylight rises.
Building the real one
Next steps: make a 3D model of the cloud, work out a metal frame for its structure and hanging, and map its internal structure to the LEDs.