When my friends and family ask “What kind of a class is inflatables? What does that have to do with Entertainment Technology (my major)?“, the first subject I bring up is bouncy houses. Bouncy houses combine the world of inflatable sculpture with physical intractability, enticing active kids and kids-at-heart with their colorful, elastic forms.
For my In the World inflatable, I have selected the largest bouncy house in the world, officially named “The World’s Biggest Bounce House”. The house is an enormous one-of-a-kind structure produced by Big Bounce America, boasting a footprint of over 13,000 square feet. Along with its posse of showrunners, the House moves across the country, setting up in a new location nearly every weekend (although it has somewhat longer residency in Florida and California).
Bouncy houses are perhaps the prototypic complex inflatable structure, but certainly are the chief example of inflatable location-based entertainment. Learning to design environments that are so adaptable, portable, and whimsical is one of the primary reasons why I chose this class, and seeing our course material reflected in the design is very fulfilling. Although massive, the House is still composed of our fundamental 3D forms – cylinders, spheres, prisms, and cones. Vibrant colors even call attention to these fundamental structures, highlighting how the forms are connected.
When we were told to find some new version of a soft sculpture or inflatable in the real world, my mind immediately went to Fredrik Tjaerandsen and his inflatable dresses.
He creates these dresses out of latex that first start off fully blown up, which encapsulates the model’s body. Then, the model is able to deflate the dress from inside of it, and as it lets out air, it then transforms into a dress that the model continues to wear.
What I found most interesting about this was the use of both the inflated and deflated shape of the dress. When I was making my improvisational inflatables, I was only thinking about the look of the inflatable in its inflated state and didn’t think of anything else. In this case, it is clear that Tjaerandsen thinks about the design of both the inflated and the deflated state of the dress.
Additionally, these designs also highlight the deflation of the inflatable – you can see the dress appear to grow taller as it deflates and changes shape, eventually falling downwards into a dress-like form.
Here is a video of a fashion show in which Tjaerandsen showcased many of his inflatable dresses. He also experiments with different inflated parts of a look, such as sleeves.
These inflatables are made of a material called “Smash,” which consists of specialized long fibers of non-woven polyester that can be manipulated into different forms using hot press forming technology. The Japanese design studio nendo created lighting fixtures resembling Japanese chochin paper lanterns using this fabric. nendo intended to demonstrate the possibilities of what new materials developed by Japanese synthetic fiber technology could bring, so at the Tokyo Fibre ‘09 Senseware exhibition nendo treated the “Smash” fabric like blown glass by blowing and shaping it into a seamless one-piece lantern. Due to the lack of precise control in this process, no one lighting fixture is identical to another one.
These blown-fabric lights fascinate me because of how innovatively they were created; it is not very common or intuitive to apply the processing methods of a particular material to one that is wildly different. Because of materials’ inherent differences in molecular structure and mechanical properties, it is hard to treat certain materials in similar ways to others. However, nendo, in their playful approach to design, created lighting fixtures with an unlikely material and an unlikely building process.
In this class, I would like to approach the work we will do in a similarly playful and thoughtful manner. I’d like to explore ways to use materials in unexpected ways to create unexpected structures that pique people’s curiosities and that are inviting to people for them to interact with the structures.
I am not sure if this is a valid topic, but I want to share it with your guys — The Dolls. They are not regular inflatables sex dolls. They are much more expensive and constructed with aluminum alloy bone structure and silicon skin to mimic human body shape with movable joints. Their costs ranging from 2k to 5k.
I would call them soft sculptures instead of sex toys, because out their in the world, especially in ACG (animation, comics and games) circles, lots of people buy these sculptures for cosplay or they just enjoy changing nice clothes for dolls. Besides all these, these dolls often weight more then 30kg (66 pounds) and are pretty fragile.
I find these soft sculptures amazing because I never realized how detailed they could be. Picture 2 reveals some detail of the doll’s (in picture 3) hands. And there are people making a living by doing makeups for those sculptures. Picture 1 is taken from a painter’s house who was doing makeups for dolls’ heads to make them more alive. There are people (especially girls) enjoy dressing those sculptures up and it is just amazing to see how beautiful they could be.
China now is producing and exporting majority of these sculptures. All pictures in this post are found from Chinse companies. I also found several company pages that demonstrating more dolls. But please be careful, though I do not recognize these sculptures as sex toys only, they still have the function of sex toys. If you do not feel comfortable then perhaps do not open the link.
I wasn’t sure if our examples had to be art, but I think you could argue this is art in a way. My example is Nathan Fielder’s chili suit (season 4 episode 2). In the episode, Nathan creates an inflatable suit which he fills with chili. The suit is fitted with a pump for dispensing the chili. He then wears the suit into a baseball stadium with clothes on top to disguise the suit, and sells chili discreetly out of it. While this is a pretty silly concept, I actually think it’s genius for a few reasons. First of all, I like the idea of inflating with unconventional material. I like that it is functional and wearable. I like that there is a mechanism for moving stuff out of the inflatable. I think these ideas can be taken further in other contexts. What if we thought of the inflatable as a system, with materials entering and exiting?
Okay I actually just remembered an artist who works with inflatables that I really do respect and is less silly than Nathan’s work. Lilah Rose is a soft sculpture artist from LA. Here’s what she has to say about her work: “I make soft sculpture, and I specifically make work that I hope will play well off the other elements of someone’s home. I want it to feel almost like a piece of furniture that lives on the wall. Something you could cuddle with. The home is such a precious place, and it’s very striking when you understand that the space you’re in is both functional and beautiful. The border between the art and its surroundings is there, but it starts to blur. I encourage people to approach me as an artist that will design something specifically for them and their house if they’ll let me. It flatters and serves us both, and it helps me associate with my work more as a form of portraiture.”
I got to see her work in a gallery in Berkeley last year. I love the materials she uses (often some sort of shiny fabric) and the colors (very dreamy and pearly). The pleating she does in some of her pieces is also so cool!!
I saw these bunnies in downtown Pittsburgh last Friday. They are by Amanda Parer, an Australian artist, and are intended to represent invasive species “intruding” into areas they shouldn’t be in. The one on the left is huge and you could walk beneath the head and front paws. The one on the right was smaller, at maybe 10 feet tall. I really liked being able to be beneath it; I felt like I was being hugged by a giant bunny, and the fact that it was lit up inside made it feel warm even though it was like 19 degrees at the time. I think it aslo was interesting to see how this massive inflated shape contrasted with the blocky buildings downtown. I’ve included a link to the website where I discovered that the bunnies were downtown!
Dutch artist Rosa Verloop creates these soft sculptures that resemble human forms. She bends and twists the stretchy nylon fabric with pins to depict humans in a deformed way.
What I find most interesting about her work is that though her work is inflated, it looks deflated at the same time. Also, we usually associate inflated objects and soft sculptures with cuteness, comfort and warmth but Verloop’s sculptures are the opposite of that. They are eerie, discomforting and cold. Using skin colored nylon and red thread beneath the nylon flesh, her sculptures are so realistic to the point of reminding the uncanny valley.
It is also worth noting that her sculptures are amalgamation of smaller inflatables. I think the way she piles on smaller inflated pieces is interesting.
My first inflatable mainly consisted of random small pieces that I cut out from the plastic bags. I tried to keep the color scheme random as well because I was going for the mosaic design feel. It was successful at first, but since the pieces were small, it became harder to tape the pieces together. In the beginning, I tried to make it so that tape is on the inside of the inflatables, but I realized that I have a royal blue colored tape and it would be nice to show that. This first inflatable had an end result of an asteroid or spaceship shape. It was intriguing to see how it turned out to be even though I struggled the most on this one.
I wanted to utilize more of the corner pieces of the plastic bags in my second inflatable. At this point, I already realized that bigger pieces will be easier to work with so all my cut-outs were big, random pieces. I started out with the two orange corners and taped the other pieces onto them. I also used a lot of cut-outs that w ere cut at the folded edge of the plastic bag to make symmetrical shaped (similar to how you can one cut a snowflake with paper). It was less time-consuming than the first inflatable. The main issue in this one was that corner pieces are hard to tape together as you have to alter them to a certain angle before you can apply tape. In addition, I ran out of my blue tape before I could finish it, so I had to use some green tape. This may have changed the aesthetic of the inflatable a little bit, but I think it still overall fits the mosaic feel. The end result looked like a pillow with lots of different colors.
My third inflatable was the least improvised piece. I had been experimenting with random shapes from the plastic bags in the previous two inflatables, so I decided to make something different: a longer inflatable with a star shape figure somehow. This “long shape with star” reminded me of my childhood times when I watched cartoons about magical girl protagonists who would use their magical wand to help solve the crimes around them. Inspired by that, I needed to figure out how to make a star. I searched up how to one cut a star, but since the plastic material is so slippery, it did not turn out to be great and took a couple of tries before I felt like the star pieces could fit with each other. Then it was the white part of the wand, which was originally supposed to be a wing shape, but that was too difficult and I decided to improvise that part. The bottom was just cylindrical with a smaller red cylinder shape. The hardest part of this inflatable was taping them together because there were so many creases and angles that tape could not entirely cover. Even now, air would escape quickly after I inflate it, so it would deflate almost immediately. As my friend says, the speed at which my wand deflates is how long my magic will last. 🙁
A video of her inflatableInflatables from this multimedium project are hanging and in front of the mouth sculpture.
I think When finding Shawna X’s work, I was drawn to her use of color. This is actually the only inflatable work she has done, but her exhibit’s meaning drew me in further. She wanted to display the differences in eating and manners in western cultures vs asian cultures. I thought that her inflatables(not the mouth) spoke to her message and her meaning which has a lot of relatability.
The shapes of her inflatables go from the simple eye which is a ball, to the complexity in the jellyfish structure with many tubes. The whole thing just looks so clean. Seeing where the inflatables meet each other, yet look so purposeful pertains to what we are learning about how to attach our materials together to get the shapes that we want.
I find it really interesting how many of her shapes stay cylindrical but taper at the end and hold an S like shape, if you look to her piece on the top right. Thats something I haven’t really seen before and it gives a very child-like whimsical look to it.
The first inflatable that I made was inspired by many packages that I get delivered since the covid era. I wanted the inflatable to resemble a package yet hold a more interesting shape. To do this, I randomly cut plastic bags and taped them together as if making a 3D collage.
The second inflatable was an attempt to make a round spherical shape. The most basic form of rounded shape that I could think of was a donut-shaped inflatable. I struggled a bit to hold together the plastic around the curvy edges. In the end, I decided to fold the inflatable to make the shape more solid and stay in place.
The third inflatable was initially intended to be a flower. However, due to the lack of plastic that I had with me, I could only make four simple petals. I feel that this inflatable is the least successful due to both design and the ability to inflate.
