Ruga Lumina
2017
Width 15', Height 8'
Coroplast, video projection
Ruga Lumina had been installed at two sites: Detroit Center for Design Technology, Detroit, Michigan and
3Labs, Culver City, California
In Ruga Lumina, the latest iteration of Ruga Interior Skin, interactive digital projection techniques are used to actively engage body-space relationship. As the viewers move in the space, their movements are captured by the Kinect Sensors and the information is translated into color changing information in the digital projections to be projected onto the translucent interior skin that is fabricated from 4 mm Coroplast sheets. A scaffolding that was made of cardboard and wooden rods was used to frame the somewhat flexible topology of the interior skin to facilitate the positioning and connecting of over seventy individual panels. Since the folding mechanism in each of the Coroplast panel is a flexible hinge joint, the edges of the interior skin are reinforced with fixed braces to give rigidity to this otherwise flexible topology. Both flexible and rigid, the interactive interior skin draws the connection between the body and the interior space, placing the dichotomy of permanent vs. ephemeral, solid vs. light, and materiality vs. digital fabrication at the center of the concept.
UX Design: Kyle Overton
Fabrication: Steve Dixon, Ryan Mandell (MAD Lab, IU)
Production Assistant: Siqiao Gao, Dexter Wu-corts
For research related to this installation, check out these two research articles:
Wu, J. (2018). Ruga Lumina: Folding Interior Skin with Dynamic Light, Journal of Interior Design, Volume 43, Issue 2, pp. 55-63. doi: 10.1111/joid.12123.
Wu, J. (2018). Folding Yoshimura Pattern into Large-scale
Art Installations. Lang, R., Bolitho, M. & You, Z. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Meeting on Origami in Science, Mathematics and Education (7OSME), Volume One, pp. 1-14, St. Albans, United Kingdom: Tarquin Publications.
Link to PDF
For more information of UX design, check out Kyle Overton's website here:
https://www.kyleoverton.com/ruga-lumina
Acknowledgment:
This project is supported by New Frontier of Creativity and Scholarship and Center of Arts and Humanities Institute Fellowship, Indiana University.
Photo Courtesy of Kyle Overton and Manzi Yang.