A 15-foot dome, wrapped in a web of black yarn, built as the breakout-area installation for TEDActive 2015 in Whistler, BC – the same year Untangled was the stage piece. I was invited as artist in residence after Michelle Jones and I won a TEDx incubator prize for the TEDx Artist in Residence Program, an initiative we built that’s still running globally today. The TEDxConcordiaUPortland team (now TEDxMtHood) helped me pack the dome and drive it from Portland to Whistler.
The premise was simple: step inside, slow down, and put something to paper – a word, a phrase, a story, anything that surfaced in the stillness – then attach it to the outside of the dome. Enough responses would eventually cover the whole structure, the way a blanket fort covers a room.
Almost no one did that. What they did instead was step inside, sit down, and talk – to strangers, to friends, sometimes just to themselves. The dome became a nap spot, a place for real conversation, a pocket of quiet pulled out of a packed conference schedule. I’d built a fairly thin barrier out of yarn, mostly open air, and it was enough to read as private. People treated the inside of that structure as separate from everything happening outside those walls.
That wasn’t the plan, but it’s the part I keep thinking about. It’s the same thing I noticed with Untangled at the Portland International Airport. I built a piece with one intention, and the actual use people found for it – connection, privacy, rest – mattered more than what I set out to make happen.
The dome traveled again in 2016, to TEDxMtHood at Revolution Hall in Portland. A completely different audience did the same thing: stepped inside, encountered a unique privacy, and found each other.
