Showing Up Together was envisioned and designed by Artist and illustrator Jill Dryer. The art installation features 350 18″ origami cranes following the North Star Crane sculpture with a 20′ wing span. The installation is in a large atrium taking up 60′ x 30′ x 30′ suspended between 25-55′ above the finished floor.
Jill worked with Dardinelle Troen and Nick Tomas of design studio Ditreon on presenting client documentation and preserving Jill’s artistic vision. Nick asked me to come on board to do preliminary engineering and 3d modeling for the flock massing. This project was exciting because I used Rhino Grasshopper, a new software I was learning. Grasshopper allowed me to run flocking simulations to create the massings of birds. We set parameters for how the cranes would behave and interact with the space and let the simulation run like they were actually flying inside of the atrium. By creating a freeze frame in the simulation, I extracted a spreadsheet calling out the XYZ coordinates of the cranes in space.
I also did project renders. Creating these images requiered modeling the atrium from scratch. The renders turned out better than expected and captured nuances like the shadows created by the cranes in the seting sun and views from outside the building.