Vancouver Aquarium Jelly Swarm

Jelly Swarm is an interactive art installation inspired by the luminescent jellies found off the coast of British Columbia, Canada.

Located in the Pacific Canada Pavilion gallery at the Vancouver Aquarium, Jelly Swarm features 94 carefully folded origami jellies, each containing an LED module, suspended from a reflective aluminum structure.

In the natural world, bioluminescent jellies glow when they’re disturbed. Jelly Swarm imitates that natural, reactive behaviour by allowing Aquarium visitors to surprise the origami jellies into creating beautiful patterns of colour and light. Move a hand across an interface on a plinth mounted touch screen, and the jellies respond.

When left undisturbed by the public, the origami jellies, programmed as independent objects, interact with their closest neighbours, creating generative luminescent displays.

Development & Build:
94 origami jellies made from Tyvek were laser cut and scored before folding. The Jelly Swarm structure was designed using Rhino 3D with Grasshopper and custom Visual Basic scripts. The resulting water jet cut 154 custom triangles and 430 connectors are fabricated from 2mm 6061T6 aluminum, anodized on both sides.

Lighting design and interactive was produced using a custom built Adobe Air app within Flash Builder. A bespoke ArtDMX library including an mbed based controller implemented in Actionscript 3.0 sends data over a UDP socket to the RGB LED light modules.
Created by Tangible Intervention with origami artist, Joseph Wu.

Commissioned by Rebecca Eames at Vancouver Aquarium.

Credits:
Concept: Alex Beim & Joseph Wu
Design: Reynaldo Tortoledo & Alex Beim
Design Assist: Pam Troyer & Kenji Rodriguez
Engineering Consultant: Leigh Christie
Jelly Design & Fabrication: Joseph Wu
Programming: Reynaldo Tortoledo & Pablo Gindel
Electronics: Dong Yang & Mike Manning
Structure Fabrication: Burak Ataman (FlexyShop)
Plinth Fabrication: Ken Sullivan at Vancouver Aquarium
Installation: TI team & Don Knudson (Vancouver Aquarium)
Electrical: Evan Maxwell (Vancouver Aquarium)
Production: Andy Meakin


www.tangibleintervention.com
@tangibleint