Airport visitors would encounter a gigantic field of luminous LEDs ranged across a 280 foot span, with full-motion imagery generated in real-time by its underlying artificial intelligence program. The live artwork was to respond to its environment, interacting with such things as the weather seen through the terminal windows and the flow of crowds through the terminal gates. The vast scale of both the real and virtual spaces of Horizon was to offer travelers a respite from the often tight spaces of modern travel—from the crowded lines at security gates and ticket counters to the cramped seats of economy-class flights.
The visual conception of Horizon works by inverting scale: shrinking the huge, magnifying the small. Alternative worlds open up in child’s play: virtual children become Gullivers at play within the smaller sets of the airport, the airplane, the city skyline, and the forest. For example, children on hands and knees direct all its operations: launching and landing airplanes on the runway; propelling the ground service trucks and carts; deploying sky bridges for passengers boarding or exiting their flights; activating escalators, elevators, and luggage carousels as needed; and guiding the over-all flow of the crowds as they stream, stroll, and meander through the wondrous terminal.
This idea answers the important need we had to connect with the travelers in a human and even intimate way. For the weariness of travel, we substitute the wonder of it as experienced by children, who lose themselves in gazing out at the spectacles presented by the runway, the clouds, and the skyline—and whose imaginations people such spaces in extravagant “what-if” scenarios—takeoffs (so to speak) on reality.
The installation was to be visible from all three major levels of the terminal, framed differently depending on the perspective. Indeed, it would have been rare for a traveler to see the whole expanse of it; more often, he or she would come upon smaller framings of it, and so the visual design of the work had to operate on numerous spatial scales. (For further views of the work in its architectural context, see the interactivity example quicktime.)
Time
As important to the experience as the visual look of the artwork is its time. Its pace is decisively different from the unrelenting barrage of mass media and advertising, never grabbing the viewers’ unwilling attention so as to imprint its message in them in a single distracting instant. Instead, by taking its time, it also lets its viewers take theirs.
Where the moving pictures of TV and film have a constant frame-rate that drives time forward in uniform steps, Horizon’s rhythm will fluctuate, pulse, circle back, syncopate, and even suspend itself.
Its imagery will often mark the passage of different scales of time: of day to night; of one season to the next; and of child- to adulthood.
An artificial intelligence program, which would generate the artwork in realtime, will vary not only the pacing of every sequence, but even its appearance. No scenario will ever play itself out in quite the same fashion, so that the recurrence of a familiar scene would still disclose something new with every viewing. The artwork’s interactivity would also put it in direct relationship to the time and to the activities of the terminal.
This will reward not only the long gaze of travelers awaiting their flights, but also the brief but accumulating glances of frequent flyers who pass through the terminal repeatedly: each time they make a new connection between what they now glimpsed in the artwork and what they have seen there before. For the memories of such travelers, Horizon thus stitches together a series of disparate moments into a single serene thread.
