Siphonophore - The Review

Digital Ecologies - Siphonophore from Madhav Kidao on Vimeo.

I met the Siphonophore team and got to ask some interesting things about their project. And by the way it was their first year at Europrix. They said that the project took about 12 weeks from inception to exhibition. They had a very tight schedule and it was a lot of long hours trying to get everything to work and more importantly sourcing the materials. The project itself was based upon a quite lot of serious research that they conducted. However, at the same time it was definitely about being as creative as possible and creating a fun environment. In reality all these things are related, and by creating something immediately accessible fun it allows you to more easily convey a deeper message.

It all didn't come that easily though, they had a serious number of issues with the project. They said that they constructed every element of the project and as such they had to learn a number of very different skills, from advanced scripting to electronics and all the way to manufacturing. However, at the same time, they have been trying to keep the project very much within the guidelines of the initial concept, but it definitely has been evolving in ways they had never imagined.

The main issue was the construction of the balloons themselves. Weight is a serious issue when working with floating objects and they had to conduct numerous experiments to actually make them float. One of the other issues they had was looking at how to provide sufficient power to the arduinos and motors and yet another being finding an appropriate material to actually construct the balloon. Once again this was all solved by trial and error and experimenting. They came up with many prototypes before they actually succeeded, and that's probably the most important thing to remember. Of course they also had many discussions with experts, other artists and manufacturers just to make sure that they didn't waste too much time.

The project itself is an on going experiment so they never really consider it to be finished. One of the main things they are working on currently is to make more complex relationships by delving deeper in to the code.

Also as a bonus question, I asked them about the meaning of life and got a very sophisticated answer; There is no innate meaning, therefore live every moment you are here and make the biggest impact on the world as you can. Now that's something you might want to remember.