Photography by Riley Snelling Photography
Peppered with offices for tech giants like Yahoo and Google plus dozens of other burgeoning start-ups, Kitchener-Waterloo is considered Canada’s Silicon North. In such a competitive atmosphere, workplace amenities are important to attract the industry’s highly skilled workers. Created for the lobby atrium of a tech company’s new office building, Binary Spectrum is a site-specific, three-storey installation comprising 8,000 translucent acrylic discs in complementary warm and cool colours, suspended on 650 cables. The installation was created with parametric modelling software and expresses the yin-yang relationship of the tangible (representing the rich local history of manufactured goods) and intangible (representing the new digital realm), not to mention a sense of fun. The repetitive arrangement of the discs suggests digital processes and fractal patterns found in science. The faceted furniture was specified to co-ordinate with blue-coloured seating deployed within the lobby to offer multiple vantage points for viewing the installation. As people move in the atrium, the cables sway back and forth, animating this exuberant piece of eye candy.