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As if you were in Shanghai

As part of prepping content for our new website that should be arriving in about a month, we've put together a movie fly-through of the installation. In developing and fabricating this project, we first sculpted the entire sculpture by hand in a custom thermoplastic (heat makes it malleable and then it sets at room temperature) that we cast to include all the little tube ridges of the actual construction. Then we used a digitizing arm to translate these models into the virtual world of CAD. From this virtual model we could extract all the data to build and install the sculpture. Besides being able to track locations down to the millimeter, this allowed us to consider the entire sculpture relative to the building and the viewer without ever having assembled more than about twenty feet of the actual sculpture. This was essential as it was just too big to install more than once. Besides, there's no way in hell it would have fit in the studio.

So here's a quick flythrough that gives you a pretty good sense of the sculpture's scale and what it looks like to actually move through the building with the installation overhead. Short of buying a ticket, this should do the trick.

http://vimeo.com/22562747