Building on the narrative of the designers' Vivid 2012 sculpture, sub|version, which featured a giant figure submerged in the waters of Circular Quay, e|MERGEnce is the figure made real in the form of a huge, faceted head rising out of the solid quayside.
During the day the sculpture is a study in the reduction and abstraction of the human form to basic, albeit turbulent, geometry.
When the Vivid 2014 lights go on, the form becomes a canvas for projection mapping and video captured interaction with the festival visitors.
The sculpture projection-maps live video onto the form, giving a living face to the giant, inverting the modern videogame trope of smoothing faceted models to increase realism, attempting to create form from texture; instead, e|MERGEnce takes real-time footage and re-casts it as a strongly geometric, digitized representation of the viewer.
As visitors to the festival take their turn as the sculpture's subject they experience a familiar yet utterly contrary view of themselves, contrasting wildly in terms of scale, luminance and complexity, with their individual texture presented on a reductive, inclusively human geometry. The commonality of their experience is augmented by light, shade, texture and colour effects framing and overlaying the faces over time.
The process of designing and creating e|MERGEnce has created opportunities to experiment with exciting new methods of digital fabrication, 3D scanning and generative design that are beginning to shape the built environment. The sculpture's geometry is a synthesis of a wide variety of head scans—including the designers’—creating a model that is then re-topologised to represent both an average of the individuals scanned, and the simplest geometry that can be used to represent them.
The resulting 3D model is not just a visual representation of the designer's intent; it is directly used as the digital toolpath that creates the sculpture via subtractive and additive manufacturing.
For more information, see the event highlights reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JANFCJRwPwY
And behind the scenes of the installation's design and production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RdAeLRoQ1o
