Client: Spanish Pavilion at Expo Dubai 2020

Overview

Studio Daniel Canogar presents one of its most ambitious projects to date: Dynamo, a site-specific audiovisual project designed for the Spanish Pavilion, managed by Acción Cultural (AC/E) -the public company responsible for the presence of Spain in Universal and International Exhibitions-, in Expo Dubái 2020, produced in collaboration with the music composer Francisco López. The artwork, suspended in the atrium of the main pavilion and surrounded by a descendant and spiral alley, consists of three sculptural screens shaped like interlaced loops that feature generative audiovisual content through the interaction of the visitors and the railing along the ramp. The more contact the rail detects, the more dynamic and colorful the content of Dynamo’ screens will be. Similarly, the sound will be more intense when the interaction is higher. This way, the activation of the artwork is completely in the hands of the visitors.

Goals

The public can interact with the sculptural screens via an interactive system built into the ramp’s handrail: hands placed under the handrail’s sensors translate into animated sparks on the screens. The more the public activates the sensors, the more vibrant Dynamo’s visual and acoustic content becomes. Mimicking the workings of an electromagnetic dynamo, the artwork eventually collects enough energy to generate a thundering visual and acoustic experience that resonates through the atrium. This moment captures the intense roar of so many machines of the past echoing through our modern history, technologies that we behold with a mixture of fear and fascination. The ecstatic discharge is followed by a calmer phase evocative of the circulatory systems of living entities. This quieter mode gives way to a new cycle of gradual buildup, in a repeating process of “collect and release” that is so much part of energy systems both biological and technological.

Dynamo is a meditation on the circulatory nature of energy and the synchronization of biological and technological systems. It is also an invitation for us to imagine and participate in the dynamos that will energize our future.