Artist Jennifer Wen Ma and lighting designer Zheng Jianwe have collaborated to create “Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light” at Beijing’s famed Water Cube aquatic center. Their work translates the I Ching and the mood of the Chinese people (as scrapped from microblogging tools like Weibo) into a real-time light show on the building’s distinctive exterior. It is mesmerizing to watch the membrane of the building glow and it reminds me of another interactive art installation, “Fühlometer” (Monumental Interactive Smiley) by Julius von Bismarck, Benjamin Maus, and Richard Wilhelmer, which translated a city’s mood into one monumental communal emoticon. While “Fühlometer” used cameras to detect the facial expressions of inhabitants and used that to generate the appropriate image, “Nature and Man…” turns to social media as a barometer of the collective consciousness.
