This Exquisite Forest
Client: Google, Tate Modern Museum
Location: Tate Modern, London
Year: 2012
Brief: To design a temporary installation for ‘This Exquisite Forest’ – a project programmed by digital artists Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk. Interior design to include a room within the foyer for visitors to view and interact with the project and a furniture-system containing screens and tablets for further hands on interaction.
To create a physical environment in support of Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk’s computer-based animation – which invited visitors to create a short animation that could be viewed and then added to by others, the process mapped by the growth of an ever expanding forest – we worked in close collaboration with the artists and client Google to design a spatial experience that balanced their strong aesthetic demands with that of Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate.
Our conceptual approach was to create an oasis where the distractions of the Museum fall away and you find yourself in a quiet, calm space that nurtures creativity and contemplation, making you equally comfortable whether adding to the piece or simply watching others.
We clad the walls in barrasol to give a seamless plane for projection and to signal a distinct change of experience so that stepping into the space would feel almost like you were entering the website itself. This treatment allowed the bespoke, self-contained furniture pieces we introduced to provide the structure, creating the internal architecture of the space.
These pieces were crafted in clean, organic shapes and formed in stained oak, a material already found within the wider Tate environment, to compliment the theme of the interactive and provide contrast to the digital screens and tablets embedded and attached to them.