but even she is subdued just now. They built
more of the last ex hibition than usua l, which
put them behind schedule, and holidays kept
interrupting their work. “ ‘Oceans’ is going
to be heav y metal for us, because it’s less time
and a lot more pieces,” Alonso says. The team
has a punch list of items it’s responsible for:
a submarine-exploration video game, a life-
size animated i lm of wha les and sunish and
giant squid, a sandbox that becomes ocean
and beach and blufs in real time.
The least formed and potentially most
important idea—it’ll be in the exhibition’s
last room before v isitors are funneled to the
gift shop—is a still-nascent notion of a fully
immersive interactive display about conser-
vation. (The team refers to an interactive
display as simply an “interactive.”)
Alonso’s team is as tied to the science as
the preparators are but unbound by con-
straints of clay and foam and f luorescent
paint. Which means its challenge is a good
old-fashioned ticking clock.25 DAYS
UNTIL OPENINGHOW TO TEACH WILDLIFE
CONSERVATIONBrett Peterson, an interactive-exhibit
developer, has a lot of Xbox Kinects, the
video-gaming device that allows people
to control a game using body movements
instead of a joystick-like controller. In his
work area, there are Kinects everywhere.
Peterson has one rigged up to the ceiling
pointing straight down, alongside a projec-
tor oriented the same way. The Kinect maps
every object in the room, and Peterson writes
software that tells the projector to spit out
images based on what the Kinect sees.
The lights are of. The projector is spraying
the loor with a swirling mass of three-inch
polygons. Fish. They skirt any large objects
the Kinect has mapped. When Peterson
walks into the room, the ish projections part
to make way for him.
The point here is about conservation and
the efect of humans on ish populations: The
ish on the loor will dodge the museum-goers.
If too many people come through, the ish will
be trampled and slowly disappear.
Peterson sits at the computer he’s using to
debug the software, lights from the projector
playing on his face. He’s working on an idea
that came from Ariel Nevarez, the team’s
technologist, who tends to ixate on indingexhibitions—anything that requires soft-
ware. (A coterie of editors and graphic
designers works with both Interactive and
the ifth loor on the words and pictures that
accompany their creations, such as placards
and informational panels.) Its work space is
bland, harshly lit, and strewn with plywood
and circuit boards and sensors and joysticks
and cameras. The team functions like a
startup, and its space looks like the oices
you keep before you close your Series A.
The team is very behind.
An ebullient woman named Hélène
Alonso leads the Interactive Experiences,resting on the Crock-Pot and dips it into the
clay. In the heat of the pot it’s viscous and
hand malleable. She applies a glop of it to
the gouge. When it cools, she’ll carve. She’ll
make the panels overlap, and ask again.
67 DAYS
UNTIL OPENINGTHE INTERACTIVE TEAMTwo loors down from the workshop is the
work space of Exhibition Interactive Expe-
riences, the other team that helps build
Below:Interactive-exhibit developer Brett Peterson’s workstation, with a DIY arcade-game controller for
testing a submarine video game.Bottom: Peterson debugs/plays with the interactive conservation game.
Opposite:Neon-painted ish atop photos of their real-life counterparts, for comparison.
JULY/AUGUST_201 75