NOVA Light Labs designed Periodic, a month long immersive interactive art pop-up in downtown Seattle for MG2 Design and Amazon.

MG2 wanted 1 month of the ultimate interactive art space, built for Amazon inside a glass gallery at the foot of a downtown Seattle high rise. NOVA delivered with the ultimate signature immersive experience.

A vibrant room of interactive art installations. Every one developed in house.

Tickets sold online in half hour and hour slots. The run stayed close to sold out for the full month. By night the whole gallery glowed onto the street.

An immersive experience that played like a science center crossed with an art gallery from the future.

Docents let each group in at its appointed time. Then the room took over. Guests drifted between stations at their own pace, hands hovering over sensors, heads bent to eyepieces and screens.

Nobody watched from the edge. Every piece asked for a touch, a step closer, or a turn at the controls, and the hour went fast. Outside on the sidewalk, passersby stopped at the glass and stayed.

“I stumbled across a fun little pop-up exhibit while down in a new addition to the Amazon complex in Belltown. An intriguing, mini-electronic science fair with an emphasis on visuals, with well crafted exhibits.

With just a few minutes to explore and no one else there, I could generate sound and line by caressing a potted plant, magnify any number of organic and man-made objects, make mountains and canyons in sandbox that automatically generated topographic maps in real time, enjoy a cascade of projected shaped as they did their virtual bouncing along a physical shelf.”

Robert W.
Artist
Williamson Studios

Interactive art installations, custom visuals, and lighting design filled a single glass room, every piece developed in house.

The Sandbox of Life read its own terrain and filled the valleys with swimming animals. Floragraph turned a hand near its leaves into sound and light. Microscopia opened a hidden world at 400x from whatever a guest pulled from a pocket, and Sim Sim 5000 posed as an arcade cabinet, an ancestor simulator running the great simulation games of the 1990s.

A 3D printer turned out gold brackets shaped like coral and bone, handed to guests when a print finished in time. A wall of LED bars shifted color as bodies passed, a house of mirrors rebuilt in light.

Projection mapping covered the gallery wall, deep space imagery ran on a large screen, and custom digital art printed at very large format hung against the glass.

Color washed the ceiling baffles and the glass line, and after dark the box became a lantern on the block.

Every interactive art installation at Periodic was designed, fabricated, and coded in house by NOVA for a 1 month run in downtown Seattle, Washington.

Nothing was rented. Custom steel bases were welded for each station, components were 3D printed to fit, and the interaction code was written from scratch. Each piece was a signature work built for this room.

Reliability was the spec. Every station was engineered to run daily across the full month with a docent team on the floor and no downtime. Projection mapping, a large screen, and a full lighting design ran alongside a custom soundtrack.