Artistic Intent: The intent is to slow individuals of bustling New York to stop and pay attention to their environment and specifically the flower instillation. It’s interactive so people can also play and experiment with the movement of the flowers and experience its “choreography.”
New Intent with Soft Tech: Since this installation is inspired so much by nature and has such natural movements, I think it would be really cool to make a similar sculpture but mimic a different part of nature. I think instead the sculpture would be on the ground and not hanging, or maybe in a water tank on a pedestal. Then instead of flowers you would have ambiguous blobs or coral that would “breath” or expand based off if you slow down to look, or if you interact with the sculpture. It would be synchronized just like the flower sculpture. So, you would need soft technologies to actuate this inflating and make it look natural. Plus, the expanding would need to react to based off the sensors that are tracking the individuals passing by.
citations: https://www.deeplocal.com/google-flowers
Tech Paper Citations:
K. M. Digumarti, A. T. Conn, and J. Rossiter. Euglenoid-Inspired Giant Shape Change for Highly Deformable Soft Robots. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2(4):2302–2307, October 2017. doi:10.1109/LRA.2017.2726113.