ARTWORK
The artwork for the Convention Center extends the link between Oklahoma City’s spirit and its aspirational vision, from the Skydance Pedestrian Bridge to the Convention Center itself. It is a call to reconsider the changeable, majestic sky that is so much a part of the city’s environment, its cultural history, its economy.
It is conceived as a synergy of fixed and fluid elements, a layering of form and light and of moments captured in real-time. Here, the beauty and changeability of the Oklahoma Sky is re-conceptualized through technology. The suspended artwork spans the two atriums. Within each, anodized titanium forms create an environment inspired by the sky’s movement. The palette of colors evokes the subtle shifts of color one experiences throughout the day and throughout the season. The reflective surfaces capture light, the material responding to light and shadow from the surrounding environment. A grid of programmable LED lights connected to a stream of Open Data Portals trace weather data in real-time. These dynamic layers bring an immediacy to the work and the opportunity for public engagement and discovery that will grow and change over time.
From the street, the artwork plays with the ever-changing reflections of the Convention Center’s curtain wall. Inside, its colors and reflective surfaces bring the sky into the atriums and animate the public spaces. Throughout the day the artwork comes alive, a reflection of the changing sky. Like the building’s glass atriums, the artwork’s transparency invites the public in. The elusive nature of the reflective titanium and dynamic light creates an ever-changing three-dimensional color field as one’s perspective shifts. In the evening the animated movement of color is experienced from the interior of the atriums and from the streetscape and park beyond. The region’s invisible layers of data become the means to activate the artwork through the powerful and yet ephemeral language of light. These real-time shifts in light and color mirror and reflect upon the natural world.
Directing the gaze upward, the artwork re-conceptualizes the common experience of living under that waiting sky. We live under it, sensing it physically, perhaps unconsciously, sometimes taking it for granted. It seeks to give that shared experience a new expression, to create a new common language for this city on a plain under a vast sky.
