Carnal Torpor – The Initiation of the CalmDome

Friday, June 15th to Saturday, July 21st, 2007

Designed with the artist-collective Carnal Torpor, the CalmDome is intended to be a new form of public space which empowers and protects the creative impulse. The CalmDome functions is as an environmental computing platform, allowing multiple users to engage both wireless interface objects and their own bodies to control a vast range of different software applications within a variety of different contexts, such as sporting, therapeutic, musical, and educational, as well as emergent new modes of creation and interaction.

The piece is an inhabitable geometric construction based on a distorted, truncated icosahedron (a soccer ball) with pattern exterior surfaces precision-cut from MDF with a CNC-router. Interior surfaces are lined with foam and wired with microphones, proximity sensors, contact speakers and a video monitor.

The work has been exhibited at the Smart Museum in Chicago, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, and in Kansas City.