Cosmos Original

Jen Lewin is an internationally renowned light and interactive sculptor based out of New York City. Over the last 20 years, Lewin has honed her highly technical medium to fabricate large-scale interactive sculptures that combine light, sound, and motion to encourage community interaction. Lewin’s use of technology as a medium challenges popular conceptions of new media works and their limitations. Her work sits at the crossroads between visual art, architecture, and technology. Focusing on pieces made for public use, she thinks beyond a traditional art exhibition to create an experience that brings vibrancy to neighborhoods, parks, and public spaces. While designed to be easily accessible and feel simple in form to the audience, the work is highly custom and technologically driven. Lewin and her team design the circuit boards, write all the code, 3D model custom forms, and look to manufacture all of the parts in-house to then build large, electronic, interactive sculptures. Beyond artistic vision is a mastery of programming, computer science, mechanical design and engineering that Lewin has honed in order to create art that exists through participation, particularly with other people together. Cosmos, by Lewin, spans 15,000 square feet in its full form, being the largest sculpture ever to be commissioned from the studio. It consists of 335 platforms, with over 80,000 LEDs, that are coded to sense and respond to impact and vibration by displaying beautiful, swirling eddies of light. An interactive landscape of meandering pathways of light, it has been engineered to perfectly process human interaction and creates a shared space and immersive experience for collaborative play. Cosmos is the latest addition to Lewin’s “Have Art, Will Travel” program that includes a series of interactive sculptures that travel the globe for short and long term exhibitions. The goal of which is to evoke the evolution of symmetry and beauty seen in organic systems. While the works are crafted to be able to travel and install quickly, each installation is completely unique and designed by Lewin to integrate, compliment, and expound on the environment of each exhibition. What is amazing to see is that no matter where the work travels, people respond with the same sense of joy and playfulness. The sculpture was originally commissioned by the East Japan Railway Company to commemorate the opening of Tokyo’s new Takanawa Railway Station and was open to the public as a part of Takanawa Gateway Fest in July through September, 2020. Cosmos also received a 2020/2021 Black Rock City Honorarium and was displayed in virtual form in this year’s Burning Man Multiverse virtual reality festival. Redefining how users engage with art and each other is what Lewin aims to achieve-- creating art that is experienced, not just viewed. At the heart of the work is the idea that the audience is an integral part of the experience, one which is unique to the environment and the fleeting movements of users. Each platform of Cosmos is created from a rotationally molded plastic shell, with an acrylic, mirrored top. Portions of the sculpture are environments of giant, concentric circles created from circular pads, whereas other parts of the work are derived from the Golden Ratio, inspired directly from examining the evolution of symmetry in natural systems. These platforms are not controlled from a single computer, router, or graphic system but rather from raw code that can process human interaction as a mesh network with each of the sculpture’s independent yet connected platforms. During the day, Cosmos’s dichroic mirror surface reflects the sky, audience, and surrounding environment, instantly transforming the space with a dreamy, ethereal quality. The mirage of shifting color encourages a moment of play, leading to profound contextual, connected community response to the space in which it is installed. At night, Cosmos animates and glows in full illuminated interactivity, engaging individuals or groups in collaborative play. To interact with the platforms one must engage actively within the sculpture by stepping, running, jumping, or playing on the piece. User inputs such as foot pressure and frequency are sensed by the surface of the sculpture. Those values determine the interaction between the platforms and the users by adding and subtracting light. To experience Cosmos’ full-color capacity, users need to engage with other participants. The interaction varies dramatically depending on the number of individuals involved. No matter the time of day, Cosmos explores the role light plays in creating an environment steeped in sensation, while blurring the boundaries between audience and actor, spectator and spectacle. While the sculpture transforms the landscape on its own, it does not truly come to life until users participate.